Privacy And Publicity

Basically, nearly everything on talks@bham is publicly accessible. The main thing that is partially hidden is your email address, but this is visible to all logged-in users. Unlike the Cambridge system, by default we only allow people with an email address ending in bham.ac.uk to register on the system.

The whole point of talks@bham is to publicise talks. So it is taken as read that all data you enter into talks@bham about talks (speaker name, venue, title, abstract) is public information, and talks@bham will publicise it for you. If you do not want information about a talk to be made public, please do not put that information into talks@bham. It’s fine to use talks@bham to publicise talks that are not open to the general public, but the general public will still be able to read the information you put into talks@bham.

If you opt to keep your list or talk out of the talks@bham directory, this will stop it appearing in the index, our search, and the randomly generated list of talks down the right-hand side of the page. However, Google and similar sites will still be able to find this information.

Along with the talk details, we will also publicise the name and appropriate contact information of the organizer of each talk. We need to do this because someone interested in a talk may have questions such as ‘I am an undergraduate; please may I come to this talk?’ or ‘Does the venue have disabled access?’ To allow such questions to be answered, talks@bham supplies the name and email address of the organizer.

The same contact details of anyone who manages a talk-list on talks@bham are provided on a page associated with that talk-list. We do this because the manager of a list is effectively the author of all the webpages associated with that list. It’s normal practice for the author of every webpage to be identified so that he or she can be contacted if corrections or further information are required. When you become a manager of a talk-list on talks@bham you must consent to being identified as the manager.

Because the email addresses of people with talks@bham accounts is visible to logged-in users, you may wish to consult a speaker before adding their email address to the ‘speaker’s email’ box when adding a new talk, as their address becomes available to thousands of people.

And finally, the managers of talks.cam have access to all the data entered in the system. They may look at the data, including your personal data, in order to enhance your talks@bham experience.