Privacy Policies
Learn about MIT Orbit privacy policies
Introduction
The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship is committed to supporting the privacy of the community of entrepreneurs of MIT. This Privacy Statement explains the Orbit platform handles and uses the personal information we collect about you.
What personal information we collect
While specific information may vary for particular individuals, we may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal information about you, which we have grouped together as follows:
- Basic biographic/contact information – name, email addresses, MIT school, and social media contact information
- Course, including specific classes taken
- Photograph
- Biographical sketch (provided by you)
How we collect personal information about you
The majority of this information we collect directly from you when you register for access to Orbit. Some information is pulled internally through MIT systems and databases.
How we use your personal information
We use your personal information for a number of legitimate purposes all in support of the Institute and its mission. Specifically, we use your personal information to:
- Provide you with access to Orbit and its functionality
- Communicate with you
- Perform research and other standard academic purposes
If you have concerns about any of these purposes, or how we communicate with you, please contact us at MITOrbit@mit.edu. We will always respect a request by you to stop processing your personal information (subject to our legal obligations).
How your information is stored and secured
Orbit is hosted on the MongoDB platform. For more information on the security of your information, please visit https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas/security.
We consider our relationship with Orbit’s community of MIT entrepreneurs to be life-long. We will retain your personal information until you indicate that you wish for MIT to delete your account. Upon a request to erase information, we will maintain a core set of personal data to ensure we do not contact you inadvertently in the future, as well as any information necessary for MIT archival purposes. We may also need to retain some information for legal purposes. In the event of an actual or threatened legal claim, we may retain your information for purposes of establishing, defending against or exercising our rights with respect to such claim. We may also choose to retain de-identified information about your Orbit account and participation in Orbit. Under no circumstances will we re-identify this information with any information retained about your account.
Rights for individuals in the European Economic Area
You have the right in certain circumstances to (1) access your personal information; (2) to correct or erase information; (3) restrict processing; and (4) object to communications, direct marketing, or profiling. To the extent applicable, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation provides further information about your rights. You also have the right to lodge complaints with your national or regional data protection authority.
By providing information directly to MIT, you consent to the transfer of your personal information outside of the European Economic Area to the United States. You understand that the current laws and regulations of the United States may not provide the same level of protection as the data and privacy laws and regulations of the EEA.
You are under no statutory or contractual obligation to provide any personal data to us.
Additional Information
We may change this Privacy Statement from time to time. If we make any significant changes in the way we treat your personal information we will make this clear on our MIT websites or by contacting you directly.
The controller for your personal information is MIT. If you are in the EU or UK and wish to assert any of your applicable GDPR rights, please contact dataprotection@mit.edu.
What are Orbit’s policies and principles for it’s new Generative AI tools?
This information is subject to our overall privacy policies, as well as our honest broker policies seen in our mission - https://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/mission.
We are using these policy principles as we design our MIT AI offerings, including Orbit:
https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/policy/navigating-data-privacy/
https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/policy/navigating-data-privacy
For our GenerativeAI data, we store each user user's info into local vector database instances. We use Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and do not share to our LLM partners. Our intention is to only use the data for academic purposes, not passing to third parties.