More on privacy

We hope that this profile will provide you with a modern online profile that you can share with colleagues, add to social media profiles and business cards, and put on publications. It is intended to help raise the profile and visibility of OU academics online.

The People Profile system integrates information about you into one central profile from a variety of OU sources. It enables you to choose which aspects you would like to share and which you would like to make private.

Much of the information that is contained in this profile comes from PIMS (People Information Management System - http://intranet6.open.ac.uk/human-resources/info-management-systems/info...) and is presented on your profile page. You will notice that when you go to edit your profile there is a section called ‘Open University information’ which contains many un-editable fields. If you want to update this personal data use the Self Service tool available at https://msds.open.ac.uk/sss/ and the changes will be updated on your profile overnight.

Alongside the PIMS information there is additional information that you might choose to share about yourself (research interests, blog address etc) which is not held in other OU databases. This information can be made available in this central profile. Over time additional staff-related information from other OU systems will be added to these profiles.

Privacy

Privacy is a key consideration within these profiles. For OU academics the default privacy setting is public (for other categories of staff it is private). If you wish to change these settings please alter them to your preference.

There are two levels of profile privacy:

Public:

Information that you choose to make public is open to the wider web. You can find your publicly available profile page at www.open.ac.uk/people/[youroucu] which shows the information that you have chosen to make public.

When you mark information about yourself as public it is open to search engines such as Google (and hence will likely be returned if somebody searches online for your name) and is also made available as linked open data (http://linkeddata.org/) via data.open.ac.uk under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 4.0 license. To view the information about you on data.open.ac.uk please visit http://data.open.ac.uk/lookup/ and enter your OUCU into the OUCU field.

You can change your mind as often as you wish about which items of data are public and which are private.

Private:

The profile system will not publish or make available any information that you mark as private. However please note that PIMS (the system from which most of the information on this profile is drawn) also provides information to separate, unrelated OU systems. Because People Profiles and PIMS are distinct systems marking information as private on your profile will not affect the information that PIMS makes available to other systems.