Privacy policy

Draft for review by the data protection officer. Last updated: 14 October 2026.

Who we are

Futures of Maths is a research study. The data controller is Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Contact the research team at futuresofmaths@tutamail.com and the data protection officer at De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Ethics approval reference: 2026-10-5-484.

How the study is built to protect you

The study runs on two separate websites with separate databases:

• Verification site ( https://verify.futuresofmaths.com) checks that you are a researcher, either automatically using ORCID or by a manual review carried out by an independent moderator. It then gives your browser an anonymous one-time pass.
• Survey site (https://survey.futuresofmaths.com) accepts the pass and records your answers. It never receives your name, email address, ORCID iD or anything the verification site or the moderator saw.

The pass is created with a blind signature (RFC 9474). Your browser creates a random pass and hides it before asking the verification site to sign it. The verification site therefore never sees the pass it signs, and nobody, including the research team, can link a survey response to the person who was verified.

What we process on the verification site

• ORCID sign-in: your ORCID iD and the public list of works on your ORCID record. We look for journal articles that Crossref added to your record, and send the DOIs of those articles (not your iD or name) to zbMATH Open, run by FIZ Karlsruhe in Germany, to check that at least one is in mathematics or a related field. This happens in memory; we do not store your record, your name, your iD or the DOIs.
• Manual review: if you ask for one, the email address, optional ORCID iD and explanation you give are emailed directly to Hosts of Proofs and Prompts, who is not part of the research team. The website does not store your application and the research team does not see it. The moderator checks your eligibility using public sources, replies to you by email and, if they approve, sends you a sign-in link. The moderator deletes your application once they have decided, and in any case when the survey closes.
• What we keep: a keyed cryptographic hash of your ORCID iD or, after a manual review, of your email address (and of your ORCID iD if you gave it), with the sign-in method and the date. For an approved manual review we also keep a hash of your email address and the approval date until you collect your pass. These exist only to prevent one person receiving several passes. They are pseudonymised personal data and are deleted 30 days after the survey closes.

Lawful basis: performance of a task in the public interest (scientific research), UK GDPR and EU GDPR Article 6(1)(e).

The moderator acts on our behalf under a written agreement (Article 28) with a duty of confidentiality. They only verify eligibility: they never see survey answers, and because of the blind signature nobody, including the moderator, can link a pass to the person who received it.

What we process on the survey site

• Your answers, the statements you vote on or write, and your rankings and approvals.
• A hash of your pass, so that each pass can be used by one person only and you can return to your answers with your pass link.
• Dates (not times) of joining, consenting and completing.

We do not record IP addresses, device identifiers or precise timestamps. Because responses cannot be linked to you, we treat them as anonymous. Free-text answers could still reveal who you are, so please avoid including identifying details. We review free text before publishing anything and remove identifying details.

Statements you submit are reviewed by a moderator before they appear. The moderator may lightly edit the wording or tags, for example for clarity or to remove identifying details. Your original wording is kept for the research team only and is not shown to other participants or published.

Views on the governance of AI may reveal opinions that some regard as political. Where this applies, we rely on the scientific research condition (Article 9(2)(j) and, in the UK, Data Protection Act 2018 Schedule 1 paragraph 4), with appropriate safeguards including anonymisation.

Where your data is stored

Both websites and their databases are hosted by Scaleway SAS in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, under a data processing agreement. Emails (manual review applications and sign-in links) are sent with Scaleway Transactional Email in Paris, France. zbMATH Open is in Germany. The UK recognises the EU as providing adequate protection.

When you sign in with ORCID, you interact directly with ORCID, Inc., in the United States, which has its own privacy policy. To read your public record, our server sends your ORCID iD to ORCID's public API. This is the only transfer outside the UK and EU, it is limited to an identifier ORCID already holds, and it happens only if you choose ORCID; you can use manual review instead.

How long we keep data

• Verification hashes and approval records: deleted 30 days after the survey closes.
• Manual review applications: never stored by the website; deleted by the moderator once a decision is made, and in any case when the survey closes.
• Anonymous responses: kept for research and may be published as an anonymised dataset.

Your rights

You have rights to access, rectify, erase, restrict and object to the processing of your personal data. While your survey session is active, you can delete all of your answers yourself using "Withdraw my answers". After that, we cannot identify your answers, so we cannot find, change or delete them. That limitation is a deliberate privacy protection. For verification data, contact futuresofmaths@tutamail.com. For a manual review application, contact the moderator who replied to you.

You can complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) or to the data protection authority in your EU country.

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