Privacy for Jalview Users

The Jalview Desktop application which is available from the www.jalview.org site does not contain code designed to collect personal or private information without your consent. However, we do collect usage statistics to work out who is using Jalview, so we can apply for funding to support Jalview development, and make it better for our users.

Usage data is collected from the logs of various web services that the Jalview Desktop contacts through its normal operation. These are described below:

• HTTP logs on the Jalview website
  We record IP addresses of machines which access the web site, either via the browser when downloading the application, or when the Jalview Desktop user interface is launched.
  
  
  • The Jalview Getdown Launcher (Since 2.11.0) examines release channels every time Jalview launches to determine if a new release is available.
  • The questionnaire web service at www.jalview.org/cgi-bin/questionnaire.pl is checked and a unique cookie for the current questionnaire is stored in the Jalview properties file.
  • The Jalview web services stack is contacted to retrieve the currently available web services. All interactions with the public Jalview web services are logged, but we delete all job data (input data and results) after about two weeks.
  
  
• Usage Analytics
  Since Jalview 2.11.2.7, the Jalview Desktop records usage data with a self-hosted instance of the analytics stack Plausible.io via a custom GPLv3 client developed by Ben Soares. Prior to this, Jalview versions as far back as 2.4 recorded application launches via JGoogleAnalytics .
  Usage logs for Jalview record the fact that the application was started, and details about the OS, installed Jalview launcher (if any) and java version used. In the future, we will use this mechanism to improve the Desktop user interface, by tracking which parts of the user interface are being used most often.

Stopping Jalview from calling home
If you run Jalview in 'headless mode' via the command line, then the program shouldn't try to contact any of the web servers mentioned above (if it does, then it's a bug!). You can also specify some command line options to disable the questionnaire and usage statistics check. Finally, the Connections Tab of the Jalview preferences contains options for controlling the submission of usage statistics.

Other Web Clients in Jalview
The Jalview desktop is intended to make it easier to interact with web-based bioinformatics resources. However, we can't take any responsibility for the integrity of any external services you might access via the program. Sorry!