Privacy Policy

Ownership of this website

The Canine Behavioral Assessment & Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ) website is owned and maintained by staff in the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society (CIAS) at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.

Your personal information and profile

We require all users who wish to evaluate their dogs to create a profile. You will be asked to provide:

  • your name,
  • your email address,
  • the country in which you live, and
  • your consent to our privacy policy and disclaimer/terms of use.

Specific behavioral studies may ask for additional details about your dog's environment (for example, the number of children or adults in your household). You will never be asked for sensitive or personally identifiable information such as race, ethnicity, gender, household income, education level, or payment details.

When completing your profile, you can choose whether you'd like to be contacted by email for participation in future studies. We otherwise do not contact our users with marketing, advertisement, or informational emails.

Your personal information is kept confidential and is not shared with or sold to any third-party vendors or marketing companies. Study participants and those referred to this website by their veterinarian, guide dog school, working dog group, breeder, or behavioral specialist may have their name and their dog's evaluations shared with approved administrators of those groups strictly for data collection and analysis of their dog's behaviors.

Your profile, any dogs you have entered, and their evaluations are retained in our database indefinitely for analysis and research. You may request at any time to have your profile and all associated information permanently deleted by filling out our contact form or by contacting us at:

Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society
Department of Clinical Studies
3900 Delancey Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6010
cias@vet.upenn.edu

Residents of the U.S. state of California may also contact us to request the information we have stored about them in our database for 12 months prior to their request, as per the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA).

Website tracking and analytics

This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information about our users and how they use the site. This information includes, but is not limited to:

  • how you visit the site (from a desktop computer, mobile device, or tablet)
  • which web browser you're using and its version (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.)
  • which pages you visit and how long you stay on them (within a single browser session)
  • whether you fully complete an evaluation for your dog

We use this information strictly to improve the experience and usability of the site and to help us identify and diagnose any errors or issues that may occur. We do not correlate the information collected by Google Analytics with any registered profiles in our database, nor do we collect any personally identifiable information using Google Analytics (such as demographic or personal interest data typically used for advertisements).

Effective May 25, 2018, user and event data collected by our Google Analytics account are retained for a period of 26 months (see https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7667196?hl=en&utm_id=ad).

Disclaimer and terms of use

Complete details of our legal disclaimer and terms of use are available for you to review in our disclaimer page.

This privacy policy was last updated on Sunday, December 22, 2019.