Privacy notice

This notice explains what happens to the details you give us when you submit a need or apply to the FacMed hackathon. It is written to be read, not to be survived.

Last updated: 11 August 2026

Who is responsible

The controller is the University of Geneva, Faculty of Medicine (UNIGE), which organises this hackathon. Sparkboard provides the software and acts strictly as a processor: it handles your data on UNIGE’s instructions and may never use it for its own purposes.

If you would rather not be identified at all, submit your need anonymously. In that mode we store no name, no email and nothing that identifies you — and this notice has almost nothing to apply to.

What we collect

Only what the form asks for, and what a web server unavoidably sees:

• Your name, institutional email address, institution and role — when you submit under your name.
• The need statement you write, and any optional detail you add to it.
• A referral code, if you arrived through someone else’s invitation.
• Technical records kept briefly for security and abuse prevention: IP address, timestamp, browser type.

Why we use it, and on what legal basis

We use your details to run the needs campaign, to shape the November challenges, to contact you about this hackathon, and to award the CHF 500 vouchers. The legal basis is your consent, given by ticking the box on the form (GDPR Article 6(1)(a)). Technical security records rest on our legitimate interest in keeping the service working (Article 6(1)(f)).

You may withdraw your consent at any time. Withdrawing it stops any further use and does not affect what was lawful before.

Who sees it

The organising team at UNIGE, and no one else. Your details are not shared with, sold to, or transferred to any third party — not to sponsors, not to partner institutions, not to Sparkboard for its own use.

Technical hosting is provided by Sparkboard through its cloud provider. Where hosting involves storage outside Switzerland or the European Union, it is covered by the standard contractual clauses required by data-protection law.

Research use — anonymised only

The needs collected here are also a research object: how a community articulates its own problems is worth studying. Any such use is on fully anonymised data only — names, emails, institutions and any other identifier are irreversibly removed first, so that no submission can be traced back to a person.

Once anonymised in this way the data is no longer personal data, and may be analysed, aggregated and published. Nothing identifying you is ever part of that.

This follows Geneva and Swiss law — the cantonal Act on public information, access to documents and personal-data protection (LIPAD, rsGE A 2 08, and its implementing regulation RIPAD), which governs UNIGE as a cantonal public institution, and the Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP). It also follows the University’s research-ethics framework: non-medical research involving human participants is reviewed by CUREG, the University Commission for Ethical Research in Geneva, and any research use of this material is submitted to it where its rules require.

How long we keep it

Identifiable details are kept until the end of this hackathon cycle and its follow-up — at the latest 31 December 2027 — and are then deleted or irreversibly anonymised. Technical security records are kept for a few weeks at most.

Automated processing

Submitted needs are scored automatically for originality and relevance, so that the campaign can show live progress and surface distinctive submissions. This scoring has no legal or similarly significant effect on you: every decision that matters — vouchers, invitations, challenge selection — is made by the organising team.

Your rights

Under Swiss and European data-protection law you may, at any time:

• Ask what we hold about you, and get a copy.
• Have inaccurate details corrected.
• Have your details deleted, or their use restricted.
• Object to a particular use, or withdraw your consent entirely.
• Receive your data in a portable format.
• Lodge a complaint with the competent supervisory authority.

Cookies

The site uses a session cookie needed to make the forms work, and a cookie remembering your language. There is no advertising, no analytics profiling and no third-party tracking.

Changes

If this notice changes in a way that affects you, we will say so on this page and, where the change is significant, write to the address you gave us.