Privacy Policy

Introduction

HackMcGill, and by extension, McHacks, cares deeply about our users' privacy and personal data. In order to run the world class events that we do, we sometimes require personal data from our Hackers, Sponsors, Volunteers and other participants. We will always do our best to explain the use of this data in plain English and treat your data with the utmost respect in order to protect its privacy.

In order to effectively run a hackathon, we collect certain data from users both on our website passively in the form of usage analytics as well as application data our hackers provide for us.

Analytics Data

We collect analytics data on all of our web properties including but not limited to mchacks.ca, hackmcgill.com, our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages. This data is anonymous, aggregated, and may be shared publicly or privately with third parties in broad categories such as the number of visitors our properties receive per month or the general demographics of our traffic.

On app.mchacks.ca, personally identifiable information (PII) may be shared with Sentry, an application monitoring software, to help us debug and maintain our software systems. This data will only be used for the purpose of debugging and improving our systems.

Application and Event Data

In order to participate at McHacks, we need to collect a minimum of information in order to properly run the event. Information will only be used within the services that McHacks utilizes for the Application Dashboard. Such services might include but are not limited to instances of a MongoDB server, Netlify, Google Cloud Platform, Heroku, and Sentry.

Some of this information may be shared with sponsors with your explicit permission for recruiting purposes. For example, we might share a participant's Resume or CV with specific sponsors. Hacker's demographic information that we optionally collect (race, gender, age) during the application process will never be shared with sponsors and are used purely for anonymous demographic reports.

Emails and Other Messages

Information sent in Emails, Facebook Messages, Twitter and Instagram DM's and the like will be kept private to the McHacks organizing team unless explicit permission is granted.

How we keep your data safe

McHacks makes use of industry standard security and encryption techniques to gather and safeguard your data. Our infrastructure is hosted primarily in Google's data centers which use rigorous and industry standard physical security protocols to prevent physical attacks. Data access is strictly monitored internally with zero tolerance for unauthorized use. Access to application data is limited to the minimum number of organizers necessary while volunteers and other parties have limited access in order to facilitate basic operations such as check-in and registration on the day of.

Deletion Policy

Upon receipt of a written request with proof of identity via email sent to contact@mchacks.ca, we will delete all associated personal data within 30 days. Please note that your data may remain in our rolling backups after this time but will not be utilized and will be deleted from any restored versions if necessary.

Questions

Any questions regarding the McHacks privacy policy may be directed to the contact@mchacks.ca. We take your privacy seriously and value any feedback or criticism to ensure that you are comfortable with how we operate.

Last modified on January 13, 2020.