While you complete the Veterans Administration My Best Self online course to help you manage your persistent physical systems, you provide information that the website retains, allowing you to complete the course over a period of a few months. After you complete the course, the website retains your information so that you can reference it.
The privacy intention and practices of the My Best Self website are to preserve and protect the personally identifiable information (PII) for Veterans who use the website. In the creation and maintenance of the website, the developers and system owners have incorporated privacy protections throughout the entire life cycle of the system.
The website collects only the minimum amount of information necessary for you to participate.
Some of the information you provide is considered personally identifiable information (PII).
The website requires you to register in order to complete the course; to register, you provide the following PII:
- Your full name
- Your email address
After providing this information, you are assigned a non-identifiable username and a password. To use the website, you provide your username and password.
After you register, your PII is used by My Best Self for these reasons only:
- To send you general email reminders about the coursework until you complete the course
- To reset your password, if you request that
- To end your participation in the course, if you request that
Once you begin the course, you provide responses to questions about your physical and emotional well being. Those responses are retained by the website and are associated with your username, but are not associated with your name or email address. In this way, the responses you enter cannot be associated with you, except for you when you are using the website.
In addition, the website captures the date and time at which you provide certain responses, such as completing a module or adding an entry to the food log. Those dates and times are associated with your username but not with your name or email address.
The Veterans Administration accesses the responses provided by all course participants to assess the effectiveness of the course and to help make course improvements.
My Best Self uses cookies to maintain your username while you are logged in, and the course modules use cookies to allow videos to be played via YouTube. The website stores your IP address while you are logged in to help prevent illegitimate logins.
The Veterans Administration will not share your name or email address with anyone other than the personnel directly responsible for course registration activities. Responses you provide may be shared in aggregate for the purposes of publishing the effectiveness and usability of the course; aggregate data will in no way identify you personally.
At this time, the website is being used for quality improvement projects and research. Some of these projects may have additional or different privacy standards. If this is the case, additional privacy information is covered in the consent form/documentation you received when registering to use this website for the study. Retention of your data on the website for study purposes will follow VA guidelines for data retention and destruction, which are covered at https://www.va.gov/privacy-policy/#vagov-privacy-policy.
If the VA experiences a security incident and believes your name and email address were exposed, you will be notified.
Your Responsibilities
- Keep your username and password private Do not share them directly, and take reasonable precautions to avoid sharing them inadvertently.
- If you believe someone else may have obtained your username and password, notify the VA personnel so they can reset your password.
- Log out of the website when you are not using it so that your responses will not be seen by others.
- If completing the course on a device you share with other users, or in a facility where others are nearby, be careful not to expose the screen to avoid inadvertently sharing your responses or username and password.
- When you provide responses, do not include personally identifiable information such as full names, addresses, phone numbers, etc.