Article 26 Backpack™ Privacy Policy

The Article 26 Backpack is a way for young people to connect to global higher education, scholarship and training opportunities. 

Only you, the user, what we term “the Backpacker,” can decide to share the contents of the backpack with third parties, such as higher education institutions, scholarship agencies, and prospective employers.  These third parties will then have access to any evaluations and underlying support and informational documents when making decisions about your application for admission, course equivalencies, scholarship eligibility, and employment.

We take your privacy very seriously. The Article 26 Backpack team collects and manages user data according to the following Privacy Policy.  In all cases, UC Davis’ privacy policy applies.

Data Collected

We collect anonymous data from every user to monitor traffic and fix bugs. This includes information on web requests including IP addresses of site visitors, browser type and time of visit.

The Article 26 Backpack is part of an initiative to help students reach educational and career goals. We may use the categories of information you report and your use of the platform to help universities, funders, and policy makers understand how to meet the needs of Backpack users better. In our work, your identity will never be connected with the information. 

We may periodically conduct anonymous, voluntary surveys to improve service delivery. Participation in research surveys will in no way affect your account.

When registering an account, we ask you to provide certain personal information such as your name, email, date of birth and gender to create your user profile. We will not share your personal information with third parties. You may grant access to select data with third parties such as academic institutions, scholarship providers, and employers as one of the services offered on the Article 26 Backpack platform.

Your password, which you will use to access the site, is stored encrypted and thus never accessible to others. Lost passwords can be retrieved.

You are able to view, change and remove your data associated with your profile. If you wish to delete your account, use the delete button on the account page. We are also available to help you in this regard as quickly as possible. 

User Data

We only use your personal information to provide you with Backpack services or to communicate with you about our services or the website. 

We take the privacy, confidentiality and security of any data you submit or upload to the Article 26 Backpack very seriously, because it is your data. You retain ownership of the data. We will never share or access your personally identifiable data, unless granted permission by you, in order to provide you with technical assistance. Only you can grant permission to third parties--like service providers, admissions officers, or scholarship agencies--to access your personally identifiable data.

Protecting Your Data

The Article 26 Backpack administration is committed to protecting the data you entrust to us. We employ industry standard best practices (both technical and administrative) to protect against unauthorized access of your data. We cannot guarantee, however, its absolute security. To protect from loss of data, we do frequent system and incremental backups which are stored encrypted in various locations.

To further protect your data, we encourage you never to share your login information and to change your passwords regularly. 

If you have any questions regarding our security and backup procedures please contact us at [email protected].

Changes to the Privacy Policy

We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you when you log back into your Backpack, or by means of a notice on our homepage so that you are aware of any changes in relation to what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. 

Should you have any questions or concerns about our Privacy Policy please contact us at [email protected].