Privacy

This statement outlines the School of Medicine’s (University of Tasmania) policy regarding the gathering and use of personal information from the OCDDrop program. By registering to use OCDDrop, you are indicating your agreement with the terms of this privacy statement including the use of your data for research purposes. The School of Medicine (University of Tasmania) recognises the importance of keeping your personal information secure and is bound by law to do so.

In this research you will be asked to complete an online treatment for obsessive-compulsive symptoms. The program uses a psychological technique known as Vicarious Exposure or Symbolic modelling. In vicarious exposure treatments, participants learn the behavioural strategies used in exposure therapy. This is achieved by directing a computer character around a virtual world. You will be asked to learn to do exposure with ritual prevention via a person pictured on the screen who has contamination obsessions and washing rituals. When you begin the treatment, you will be asked to imagine that you are the person on the screen and to take the person though what is necessary to reduce their urge to wash after touching dirt. The person is portrayed at home and can be moved (using the computer mouse) to rooms within the house, out in the back garden or to the street and shops. You will need to learn how to reduce the anxiety level of the person and how to score points within the program. You will be asked to complete three 45 minute treatment sessions at approximately 7 day intervals.

As part of the registration process you will be asked to provide demographic information such as your age (in years), gender, level of education, whether you have any problems with your vision, and whether you are currently receiving any psychological or pharmacological treatment for your symptoms. We collect this information for research purposes and so that we can see whether OCDDrop is of interest to, and equally effective for different people.

During the OCD treatment all of your activity within the program is recorded. The program also involves completion of several questionnaires which relate to your OCD symptoms and your general distress. These questionnaires are completed both prior to and following the treatment sessions. This information will be used to conduct research into how effective OCDDrop is, so we can continue to improve the program.

In addition, a statistics counter is attached to the OCDDrop website which records information such as your Country and State/Territory/Province, referring link, and length of visit.

We require your email address so we can email you your password if required and also to send information regarding website updates, latest news, surveys, and other such information. If you no longer wish to receive emails from OCDDrop, please press the unsubscribe link at the bottom of an OCDDrop email.

All personal information gathered from the program will be stored on a secure server at the University of Tasmania and information gathered from the statistics counter will be stored under a password protected account and database. All OCDDrop project staff as well as University of Tasmania employees and contractors who manage our information systems are required by law to respect the confidentiality of any personal or research information stored on this server. The results of any research may be published in journal articles but these would contain group results only and no information which would identify you personally.
The information collected from you will not be disclosed without your consent unless required by law. We are required by law to provide law enforcement agencies with personal information if there is reason to believe that either your personal safety is compromised or you pose a threat to the personal safety of another.

The information you provide will never be shared with third parties such as advertisers and other commercial organisations. We will not send you unsolicited information or spam. You may also request that any personal information you have supplied be removed from University of Tasmania databases and all reasonable efforts will be made to remove such information if requested.

The OCDDrop website uses transient or session cookies. This means that when you open OCDDrop, information is transferred from the website to your computers hard disk. This cookie identifies your browser but does not identify you as a user. When you close your browser, the cookie is deleted, and no information is left which could identify you or your browser. Most web browsers are set up to accept cookies, but if not, cookies will need to be enabled to use the OCDDrop website.

This research has been approved by the Tasmanian Social Science Human Research Ethics Committee. If you have concerns or complaints about the conduct of this study, you may contact the Executive Officer of the Human Research Ethics Committee (Tasmania) Network on 62267479 or human.ethics@utas.edu.au. The Executive Officer is the person nominated to receive complaints from research participants. You will need to quote ethics reference number ‘H11575’.

The School of Medicine (University of Tasmania) may choose to amend the terms of this privacy statement and your continued registration and use of OCDDrop will signify your agreement with the amended terms. This privacy statement is only applicable to the OCDDrop website and does not apply to other sites and sources of information referred to by this website.

If you have any questions or require further information about the above statements, or you would like to contact us for any other reason, please email the OCDDrop staff at contact@ocddrop.com