Privacy Notice

This privacy notice discloses the privacy practices for flash-study.com and flashpair.com. This privacy notice applies solely to information collected by this website. It will notify you of the following:

1. What personally identifiable information is collected from you through the website, how it is used and with whom it may be shared.

2. What choices are available to you regarding the use of your data.

3. The security procedures in place to protect the misuse of your information.

4. How you can correct any inaccuracies in the information.

Information Collection, Use, and Sharing

We are the sole owners of the information collected on this site. We only have access to/collect information that you voluntarily give us via email or other direct contact from you. We will not sell or rent this information to anyone.

We will use your information to respond to you, regarding the reason you contacted us. We will not share your information with any third party outside of our organization, other than as necessary to fulfill your request.

Unless you ask us not to, we may contact you via email in the future to tell you about specials, new products or services, or changes to this privacy policy.

This website contains links to other sites. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the content or privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of any other site that collects personally identifiable information.

Your Access to and Control Over Information

You may opt out of any future contacts from us at any time. You can do the following at any time by contacting us via the email address or phone number given on our website:

1. See what data we have about you, if any.

2. Change/correct any data we have about you.

3. Have us delete any data we have about you.

4. Express any concern you have about our use of your data.

Security

We take precautions to protect your information. When you submit sensitive information via the website, your information is protected both online and offline.

Wherever we collect sensitive information, that information is encrypted and transmitted to us in a secure way. You can verify this by looking for a lock icon in the address bar and looking for "https" at the beginning of the address of the Web page.

While we use encryption to protect sensitive information transmitted online, we also protect your information offline. Only employees who need the information to perform a specific job (for example, billing or customer service) are granted access to personally identifiable information. The computers/servers in which we store personally identifiable information are kept in a secure environment.

If you feel that we are not abiding by this privacy policy, you should contact us immediately via telephone at 401 793-8992 or via email (flashstudy@brownhealth.org).

Google Health API Data Handling and Limited Use Addendum

This section applies strictly to data accessed, collected, and processed through the Google Health API integration for participants explicitly enrolled in the "FLASH: Finding Lasting Approaches to Sustaining Health" clinical research trial.

1. Specific Data Elements Collected

Our platform utilizes the Google Health API to passively ingest objective behavioral and physiological indicators required by the human subjects research protocol. We request access to the following restricted scopes and specific data metrics:

  • Physical Activity (auth/googlehealth.activity_and_fitness.readonly): Passive retrieval of daily total physical activity minutes, sedentary duration, and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) duration.
  • Body Weight (auth/googlehealth.health_metrics_and_measurements.readonly): Automatic syncing of daily body weight measurements logged by participants on provided tracking hardware.
  • Nutrition (auth/googlehealth.nutrition.readonly): Aggregate daily total energy intake metrics (caloric counts) explicitly recorded by the participant during the study tracking window.
  • Sleep (auth/googlehealth.sleep.readonly): Objective indicators of daily sleep parameters, including sleep timing, total sleep duration, and overall sleep quality indices.
  • Programmatic Identity Verification (auth/googlehealth.profile.readonly): Temporary retrieval of the unique Google Health User ID post-authorization, utilized solely as a programmatic key to map incoming data payloads to the participant's corresponding anonymized study identification number within the research database.

2. Google API Limited Use Policy Affirmation

Our platform’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.

3. Absolute Prohibitions on Data Commercialization and Sharing

All health data obtained via the Google Health API integrations is isolated from commercial tracking ecosystems and governed by the following constraints:

  • No Commercialization: We do not sell, rent, lease, or trade any data retrieved via Google APIs to third parties under any circumstances.
  • No Advertising or Profiling: Google Health API data payloads will never be utilized to serve advertisements, perform consumer retargeting, or execute behavioral profiling.
  • Restricted Data Transfer: We do not transfer Google Health API data to external applications or third parties, except as strictly necessary to fulfill the programmatic data integration requirements of the underlying research infrastructure under institutional protocol guidelines.

4. Specialized Research Use, Storage, and Human Access Controls

Because this infrastructure functions exclusively as an investigator-facing research tool rather than a consumer-facing application, the data lifecycle is bound to rigorous Institutional Review Board (IRB) protections:

  • No Participant-Facing Interface: Google Health API data is used purely for scientific assessment; it is not rendered or displayed back to the participant within any user-facing dashboard.
  • Investigator Dashboard Access: Ingested data is securely stored within a research platform backend, with human access strictly confined to authorized study investigators and staff.
  • Scientific Data Processing: Prior to analytical evaluation, data elements are stripped of direct personal identifiers, decoupled from calendar dates, and indexed strictly by day of study participation (e.g., Day 1, Day 2). This de-identified longitudinal data is used to drive the dynamic computational and system identification modeling required to analyze behavioral and psychosocial influences on weight loss maintenance.