Privacy notice

In brief. This notice explains the personal information Bracket holds about researchers, its uses and your rights. In Bracket, only you and the project owner can read your notes; authorised programme researchers and named collaborators may receive an agreed research export. Optional research about your background requires a separate choice and can be declined without affecting access. Hosting and backups are in the EU, while researchers may work worldwide and hold local copies where they work. Write to contact@bracketresearch.org for information or a rights request.

1. Responsibility and scope

Matthew Winkler runs Bracket personally and is the controller: the person responsible for deciding why and how personal data is used. The controller is based in France and uses the project owner's account. Institutional affiliation alone does not make an institution responsible for Bracket. Contact the controller at contact@bracketresearch.org.

This notice concerns researchers using Bracket. About the Bracket study addresses delegates observed in meetings and people named in published documents held by the programme. Bracket observes sessions of the UN climate negotiations, starting with COP31.

2. Information held

Account and directory. Account details include your email, sign-in information, role and invitation. The sign-in provider holds your password as a hash, a one-way representation rather than a readable password. Your directory profile includes names, organisation and position, and optional details such as pronouns, photo, biography, languages, public contact details and website. Badge details, attendance dates and working mode support coordination. A name, organisation and position are required to complete your profile.

Background and emergency contact. Optional background fields cover nationality, country of residence, birth year, gender, discipline and experience of the negotiations. They are private in Bracket, visible to you and the project owner. Research use requires the separate choice described in Research participation. Saving these fields retains them even without that choice; you can clear them or request erasure. An emergency contact is held for fieldwork safety and excluded from research exports. A contact given from 11 October 2026 is visible to you, the project owner and the leads of each team you currently belong to. A contact given before that date is not shown to team leads; to share it with them, give it again.

Observations and attendance. Notes include their text, type, tags, delegations, citations, sensitivity, authorship and times. Edit history includes earlier wording and device identifiers needed to reconcile work from different devices. Bracket also holds whether you reviewed your notes, meeting plans, followed topics, and attendance records showing when you joined and left. Live presence shows colleagues which meeting you are in. Recorded attendance supports coverage planning and research. Shared preparation and coverage information supports coordination.

Practice and chat. Practice records include attempts, coding and comparison with an answer key. Chat stores messages, authors and times for coordination. It is not included in research exports or analysed as research data.

Acceptance, consent and operational records. Terms acceptance records include the account, wording and version, time and action. Optional research choices are recorded separately, including withdrawal. These records do not collect an internet address or browser description as acceptance evidence. Export records describe who created a collated export, when and with which options. Administrative history records changes to shared records and profiles; retained history can contain earlier profile values. Providers also keep technical logs, which may include internet addresses and requested pages. Public service-health information does not contain research data.

3. Purposes and lawful bases

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires a lawful basis for each use of personal data. Legitimate interests means a necessary purpose weighed against the affected person's rights and interests. The programme's research purpose is to study how the negotiations proceed through systematic observations. Access restrictions, data minimisation and controls on sharing support that purpose while limiting risks.

Accepting terms is not consent to every use of personal data. Optional research consent can be refused without losing access or earned credit. For processing based on legitimate interests, you may object. Any use of sensitive information also requires the applicable additional legal conditions; a research purpose or a rule against delegate names does not remove that requirement.

Bracket makes no automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects about you.

4. Access and recipients

Administrators and track leads do not receive note content through their roles. Only the project owner creates collated exports. Authorised programme researchers and named collaborators receive only the agreed data under written handling conditions; team membership alone grants no dataset access.

The usual export replaces researcher identities with labels and excludes optional background details and note history. This is pseudonymisation, not anonymity: the project owner can identify contributors, and combinations of details may identify someone to colleagues. An identified export is a separate, recorded choice for authorised analysis and may include consenting background details and note history. Public dataset release is outside the current arrangements and requires a separate decision and appropriate contributor terms and information.

Providers process information needed to operate their services. The project owner also processes controlled copies for backup, recovery and research administration. Research data and raw support reports are not sent to external AI assistants or placed in GitHub.

5. Providers and locations

The project owner operates Bracket and holds controlled working copies in France. Researchers may use Bracket worldwide and keep local working copies and downloads wherever they work. Recipient locations and handling arrangements must be considered separately from server locations.

These locations describe the configured services; they do not establish where every provider support or administrative activity occurs. Provider support and subprocessors may involve access outside the EU. Any international transfers remain subject to applicable data-protection requirements. The controller can be contacted about the services and recipient arrangements.

GitHub holds code, synthetic tests and limited operational metadata. Availability monitoring checks service addresses and status. Neither is a destination for research data or raw support reports. Bracket does not use advertising trackers or third-party usage analytics.

6. Retention and deletion

For an emergency contact, the recorded end of your fieldwork is the last attendance date in your profile, or the closing day of the last conference where you planned to attend a meeting or kept a note, whichever is later. The period restarts only when you change the wording, not when you save it again unchanged.

Each study has a defined purpose and a recorded date when data collection closes. Necessity is reviewed at least annually and at study closure. Extending research retention requires a separate, documented justification, a defined new end date and an updated notice before the existing deadline. Annual review and further publications do not automatically extend the period.

Evidence is limited to what is needed to demonstrate acceptance, consent or withdrawal. A longer hold requires a specific justification, restricted access, an end or review date and legal review. Open rights requests and other necessary holds are assessed separately; they do not extend retention of unrelated records. The public archive of policy wording contains no personal data. Technical logs follow the providers' applicable retention arrangements.

Deleting a note in the app hides its current version but retains history. Identified exports can include that history. An erasure request therefore needs assessment across current records, history, exports and other relevant copies. A profile edit alone does not erase historic values.

Deleted data can remain in earlier backups until those backups expire, normally within twelve months. If expiry would remove the last usable recovery copy, the project owner must urgently decide how to restore adequate recovery while meeting the retention limit. This does not automatically extend retention. Any necessary exception requires a specific justification, limited scope and a defined end date. Deletion and restriction decisions are reapplied and verified before restored data becomes accessible. Files already downloaded cannot be recalled automatically; the controller follows up with recipients where a decision affects their copies.

7. Your device and security

Bracket uses sign-in cookies, preferences such as theme and selected conference, and local working storage for offline use. Successful sign-out attempts to clear that account's local work and saved pages after allowing recovery of unsent work. Failed sign-out or blocked browser storage can leave copies behind. Sign-out does not remove downloaded files. On a shared device, confirm sign-out and clear Bracket's site data before handing it to someone else.

Access to notes is restricted to the author and project owner. The project owner, administrators and team leads use a second sign-in step. Backups are encrypted before transfer to the backup store. These safeguards reduce risk but cannot guarantee that loss or unauthorised access will never occur. Report suspected incidents to contact@bracketresearch.org. The controller assesses notification to affected people and the supervisory authority under the applicable requirements.

8. Your rights and changes to this notice

You may request access, correction, erasure or restriction, and object to processing based on legitimate interests. You may withdraw optional research consent through your profile or by contacting the controller, without affecting earlier lawful processing. Portability applies where its legal conditions are met. You can download your own notes from Review; a wider access request can cover other personal information and retained history.

Requests are assessed individually. Research status, a copyright licence or software that retains history is not a blanket reason to refuse a request. The controller responds within one month, or explains a permitted extension within that month. Contact contact@bracketresearch.org; you do not need an active account or acceptance of new terms.

You may complain to the CNIL, France's data-protection authority, or another competent authority without contacting the controller first. A material change to this notice is explained to the team and issued as a new version. Privacy information is supplied separately from contractual acceptance and optional research consent.