Data Protection

Melange's datastore goes back to the website's first use for the 2011 for the Google Code-in contest. If you have questions that are not answered below regarding privacy concerns you can contact the Contest Administrators at ospoteam@gmail.com.

Who can see what information about me? 

The Contest Administrators (Google Open Source Programs employees) can always see profile information regardless of your role, your completed tasks and comments (Students), and your Parental Consent and Proof of Enrollment forms (Students).

When Students use the Google Code-in site, the "Public name" they choose (usually a nickname), is visible when they comment or work on any task in the contest. Students communicate with Mentors through the Melange site directly, no email information is exchanged from either role.

Mentor names and email addresses may always be viewed by the Organization Administrators of the Mentor's organization.

How long do you save information and what information does Melange save? 

Melange saves personally identifiable information (such as email and postal addresses) only as long as necessary to complete contests and meet applicable legal requirements. Melange may save participant work products (such as code written by students or comments written by mentors) indefinitely. Students who are Grand Prize Winners have additional information that is kept for a longer period of time per California legal requirements regarding contests for minors.

How do I delete my account? 

Press the Delete Account button at the bottom of your profile.

How do I confirm that Melange has deleted what I told it about me? 

Visit Melange and, after logging in with your Google account, you should see a My Profile link in the sidebar. If you don't see the link, you do not have a profile for the current year. If you also want to check if your profile has been correctly deleted for other instances of Google Code-in, you can visit the Google Code-in homepage, go to the URL, and change it to the year that you want to look at (e.g. if it is currently 2012, the URL will end with 2012 and if you want to look at 2011 then change the 2012 to 2011. If you don't see a link to My Profile, your profile for that year has been deleted as well. You can go through all the years of the contest and manually check the existence of the link (the first year of Google Code-in in Melange was 2010).

Can I undelete an account? 

No. Please do not casually request deletion of your profile.

When I delete my profile, does it mean I delete ALL my profiles or just for that contest?

When you delete a profile, it will only delete the current year. A profile is stored for every contest in which a user participates, so, for example, deleting a Student's Google Code-in 2012 profile will not affect the same Student's Google Code-in 2011 profile, if present.