Privacy Policy

This privacy policy covers the ODI Certificates service. For information about how the Open Data Institute (ODI) handles your personal data when you register for an account on our main website, please see our main privacy policy.

What data do we collect and why?

When you use the ODI Certificates service, we collect and store the following data:

Certificate Data

When you create certificates, we store:

• Your responses to certificate questionnaires
• Certificate metadata (titles, descriptions, URLs, etc.)
• Certificate status and level information
• Timestamps for creation and updates

Usage Analytics

We also collect data as you use this website about:

• What pages you access, so that we know what content is popular
• The device and software you use, so that we know how to design the site
• Your location, so that we know where in the world we reach

We do not link this analytics data back to your personal information and we only store it in aggregated form.

Your browser stores some of this data using cookies. Your browser sends cookie data to us and third parties every time you visit our pages. Our cookie policy has more information about the cookies we use and why we use them.

How do we use this data?

We use this data to:

• Enable the core features of this service, such as allowing you to complete your certificates at your leisure and manage earlier certificates
• Display accurate information in the resulting certificates
• Understand what the users of our website need so we can improve it
• Provide certificate badges and verification services

We do not use it for any automated decision making.

How do we share this data?

We share this data with a few third parties, who process it to give us better understanding:

• Google Analytics, to analyse the users of our website

We have made sure the third parties who are not in the EU protect the data to the same extent as companies in the EU.

Certificate data may be publicly accessible when certificates are published, as this is part of the service's purpose to demonstrate data quality and build trust.

We may also need to share this data with the authorities if they ask us to do so.

What rights and control do you have?

Because we operate in the UK, you have rights over the data that we collect. You can:

• Ask for a copy of data we have collected about you
• Ask us to update that data
• Ask us to delete it
• Ask us to stop using it

If you ask for a copy of data we have about you, we have to provide it to you free of charge. You can ask us to send it directly to a third party. We have to provide it in a commonly-used machine-readable format.

You can do some of these things through the website, by editing your certificates. Otherwise, contact: [email protected].

Please tell us if you have concerns about how we collect, use or share data about you. You can also raise your concerns with the UK Information Commissioner's Office.

User Registration Data

User registration and account management is handled by the main ODI website. For information about how we handle your registration data, personal profile information, and account details, please see our main privacy policy.

When might this policy change?

We created this privacy policy on 15th May 2018. It was last updated on August 14th, 2025.

Who can I talk to about this policy?

Please send any questions about this privacy policy to [email protected].

The data controller for this website is Open Data Institute of 4th Floor, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG.