Privacy notice
This application is used by a facilitator to run the Pathbreak game and to record what players decided, so the researchers can analyse it. It is deliberately narrow about what it collects.
What is collected
From facilitators
When a session is created, the person running it enters their name, and optionally an organisation and a location. That is all. No email address is asked for and none is stored.
From participants
Nothing that identifies you. Players are recorded only as seat numbers — Farmer 1, Consumer 3 — together with the card each seat played in each round, the resulting points, election and referendum outcomes, and the state of biodiversity. No names, no email addresses, no accounts.
From the questionnaire
After a game, participants may fill in a questionnaire on their own device. It asks what influenced your decisions, a few attitude questions, and optionally age group, gender, education, household income, how much of a burden food prices are, and political and religious views. Every question can be skipped, and nothing is required.
Answers are stored against the session, not against a person. There is no identifier linking a response to you, to a seat, or to any other response — so a questionnaire cannot be traced back to an individual, and we could not single out your answers even if asked to.
Automatically
No analytics, no advertising, no tracking, no third-party scripts, no fonts or images loaded from other servers. The application sets two kinds of cookie, both strictly functional and neither used to profile anyone:
- One that marks a browser as the facilitator of a particular session, so they can enter decisions and pick a session back up. It holds only that session’s PIN.
- One for the researchers’ own login, which holds a signed timestamp and nothing else.
The browser also keeps a part-finished questionnaire on the device itself, so a reload does not lose it. It is removed as soon as the response is sent and never leaves the device before then.
What it is used for
Research into how groups make decisions about biodiversity, food and governance, and teaching. Session records and questionnaire responses are analysed in aggregate and may appear in academic publications as summary figures.
Who can see it
A facilitator can see and download their own session using its code and PIN. The research team can see all sessions through a password-protected login. Nobody else has access, and no data is published at a public address.
Nothing is emailed anywhere, nothing is sold, and nothing is shared with third parties for marketing. There are no advertising or analytics partners to share it with.
Where it is held
On a server in the European Union, in a PostgreSQL database. Exports are generated on request and streamed to the browser that asked for them; they are never written to a file on the server.
How long
Session records and questionnaire responses are kept for as long as the research they support is active, including the period a journal may require the underlying data to be available. Because responses carry no identifiers, they cannot be selectively deleted afterwards.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you may ask what personal data is held about you, ask for it to be corrected or erased, and object to its processing. There is no charge for this. In practice the only personal data this application holds is a facilitator’s name against the sessions they ran; participant records and questionnaire responses contain nothing that identifies a person, so there is nothing to retrieve or erase against an individual.
You also have the right to complain to a data protection authority.
Contact
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Ilkhom Soliev, Chair of Environmental Sociology, Institute of Sociology, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Emil-Abderhalden-Str. 26/27, 06108 Halle (Saale), Germany.