Information provided to or gathered by ensembl.org is controlled by the Ensembl Project, a collaboration between the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the European Bioinformatics Institute, based near Cambridge, UK.
Ensembl.org gathers information about users solely to improve the usability and usefulness of the site, and not for any commercial purposes. No use is made of users' contact information except when directly requested by them, e.g. to sign up for a mailing list or activate a user account. Other information collected during the course of your usage of the site, such as pages visited, may be collected in server log files and used for statistical analysis of traffic patterns.
Customisation of this website requires that our server can identify the computer and web browser that requests data over a period of time. To do this, a small file is saved on the user's computer. This file contains no personal data, only an encrypted numeric identifier. Visitors' page settings are stored in a user database against this identifier, making it possible for us to save your settings without storing any other information about you.
All Ensembl data that is publically available for download is also freely available via the website. For the convenience of users we have introduced a wholly voluntary system of user accounts, through which we can offer additional services such as saved configurations and user groups.
Of necessity, all user accounts are accessible to the Ensembl web database administrators. However passwords are stored in one-way encrypted format and cannot be retrieved by staff.
The public release of the Ensembl database includes a blank copy of the user database, for use in setting up a local copy if required. Also, unlike the rest of the Ensembl codebase, the account system can only be extended in limited ways, to prevent abuse of systems that may be less secure than ensembl.org.