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Privacy and anonymity

Simon Fraser University has completed a Privacy Impact Assessment to use ThoughtExchange. You may participate in this exchange without providing personal information.

Designed for respectful, anonymous thought-sharing

ThoughtExchanges work best when input is concrete, respectful and actionable. Your thoughts are anonymous and they are published to the exchange immediately. Please be respectful.  

This exchange employs automatic moderation to help detect the use of personal names, and Simon Fraser University Engagement will provide additional human moderation of thoughts. When sharing thoughts, please do not enter personal information about yourself or others or any information that may identify yourself or others in any free text fields – thoughts that contain personal information or personal criticisms will be removed immediately in order to maintain compliance with FIPPA.

Demographic questions

You will be asked one question to begin the exchange asking you about the perspective you’re taking when providing thoughts (e.g. student, faculty, staff, alumni, community partner, etc.). It will be used as a filter to help explore common and divergent ideas. At no time will your answer to this question be explicitly linked to your specific thoughts or ratings: nobody at SFU will ever see a “connection” between your thoughts and the answer you provide to this question. To further support anonymity, ThoughtExchange does not use aggregate data from any demographic questions that collect fewer than 5 responses.

Remaining anonymous

You may participate in this ThoughtExchange anonymously. You are not required to provide personal information or set up a user account to participate. ThoughtExchange will install a cookie on your browser so that you may re-enter the exchange without having to answer the initial question a second time, and so that you will not be presented with thoughts to rate that you have already rated. But your thoughts, ratings and activity are not linked to personal information in any way.

Collection notice

The following collection notice is displayed on the screen immediately prior to sharing thoughts in the exchange:

COLLECTION NOTICE

The information included in your responses is collected under Section 26(c) and Section 26(e) of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. The information you provide is collected anonymously. It will contribute to the assessment of University programs and policies. Please do not enter personal information about yourself or others or any information that may identify yourself or others in any free text fields. Any responses containing information that could identify you or another person will be removed by the moderator. If you have any questions about the collection, use and disclosure of this information contact:

Executive Director, Communications and Marketing 
Simon Fraser University 
8888 University Drive 
Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6 
Phone: 778-782-5988

Please be aware that you have the option of registering with ThoughtExchange to receive notifications, track your responses, as well as other services offered by Thoughtexchange. This information is not collected by the University and is administered solely between you and ThoughtExchange. Please be advised that your use of this option may result in your information being stored or accessed outside of Canada.