PCS Privacy Policy

Precision Conference Solutions, Inc. (PCS) stores the following information in your permanent account:

• contact information consisting of name, email addresses, phone number, web page, and affiliations
• encrypted password
• conflicts that you have declared with authors
• word counts from sample publications that you have uploaded
• the number of reviews you have made for each conference
• evaluations of your reviews if provided by a conference
• email sent to you from PCS

For each conference in which you participate, PCS stores your submissions and reviews. Your "review" includes any postings you make to a related discussion about a reviewed submission.

PCS stores a log of your web interactions with the PCS server, including your IP address. The log and its backups are kept for at most 60 days.

Your name, email addresses, and affilations are visible to anybody who makes a submission using the PCS system; that information will be automatically filled in (i.e. "autocompleted") when the submitter types your name or email address on a submission form. This is done to reduce mistakes when another person makes a submission with you as co-author, and to reduce the likelihood that multiple accounts will be created for you, which would happen when a submitter provides a different email address for you than the email addresses of your existing account.

Your contact information, the number of reviews you have made for each conference, and summary statistics of your review evaluations (which you can see at Reviews→See reviewing history) are visible to conference chairpersons and to conference committee members. This is done so that these people can make informed decisions when assigning reviews to you.

Your submissions and reviews for a particular conference are visible to that conference's chairs, committee, reviewers, and perhaps others according to the policies of the conference. This is necessary for the submission and review process in which you are participating.

Your submissions and reviews are analysed by PCS's algorithms to perform the automatic matching of reviewers to submissions and the automatic clustering of submissions in a conference proceedings.

PCS performs statistical and machine-learning-based analyses of your submissions and reviews in order to improve the services offered by PCS. These analyses may be reported publically, in which case: (a) only aggregate measures will be reported; (b) your submissions and reviews will not be disclosed, in whole or in part; and (c) you will not be identifiable in any manner.

If you have submitted to or reviewed for a conference, PCS may provide your name and email address to the chairpersons of subsequent years of the same conference so that those chairpersons can invite you to review for their conference.

PCS will not provide your information to any person or organization other than those described in this Privacy Policy, unless PCS receives explicit "opt in" permission from you to do so or unless PCS is required to do so by law or court order.

PCS stores your information on its own web servers, stores your submitted papers on cloud servers, and stores backups with our ISP. The web servers and cloud servers are located in Canada. The backups are encrypted before leaving the PCS web server. The papers on cloud servers are available only through links provided within the PCS system; those links expire two hours after they are first shown.

All access to the PCS web site is done through encrypted (TLS/SSL) communication.

Your stored password is encrypted using the widely-accepted "bcrypt" algorithm. In the event that your stored password becomes public (e.g. through an attack on the PCS server), the bcrypt encoding makes it more difficult to decrypt by brute force. Passwords are not stored in any log files.

In the event that PCS detects a data breech, you will be informed within 72 hours of detection by PCS.

You can modify your information through these pages:

• Account → Change contact information
• Reviews → Provide sample publications
• Reviews → Manage conflicts

You can see your review history at

• Reviews → See reviewing history

Corrections to your review history can be made by emailing to support@precisionconference.com.

Corrections to your review evaluations should be requested by emailing to the relevant conference chairs, who will then ask PCS to make the corrections if they think the corrections are warranted.

You can delete your account from

• Account → Remove account

After account deletion, your information will be retained in logs and backups for up to 60 days, after which it will be completely removed.

However, any submissions on which you are co-author and any reviews that you have been assigned will be retained for the corresponding conferences. Please contact the conference chairs if you want that information also deleted.

Please contact support@precisionconference.com with any questions or concerns.