About the Bracket study

Bracket is a research programme on how negotiations proceed inside meetings of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC): what is said, by which delegation, about which paragraph of which draft text, and with what effect on the text. This page is for two groups of people the study concerns but has not contacted one by one: the delegates in the meetings the research team observes, and the people named in the published documents the project holds. The researchers themselves are covered by their own privacy notice, shown to each of them before they join.

Who is responsible. Matthew Winkler, an independent researcher, is the data controller. Write to contact@bracketresearch.org about anything on this page.

If you are a delegate in a meeting we observe

• A team of researchers attends UNFCCC sessions and takes written notes in the meetings its members attend.
• We record delegations, not people. Notes name Parties, negotiating groups and roles, picked from a list, such as "the Co-facilitator, Norway". They never record an individual's name: our tool has no field for one, it says so as a note is written when free text looks like a personal name, and any note that still looks like one is listed for rewording before a dataset leaves the team. We make no audio or video recordings and take no photographs of delegates.
• The notes can be read only by the researcher who wrote them and by the controller. The controller's account, like every administrator's, signs in in two steps: a password and a code from an authenticator app. Administrators manage accounts and meetings; they never read notes.
• Our findings attribute what was said to delegations and groups, never to named individuals.
• Where a delegation has a single member, a note about that delegation is about one person to anybody who knows who was in the room. We hold no link between a delegation and a person's name, and those notes carry the same safeguards as all the others.

If you are named in a document we hold

• The project keeps a research library of published documents: the UNFCCC's official documents, and published reporting on the negotiations, such as the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, Third World Network's updates, ECO and Carbon Brief. Some of them name negotiators, chairs and ministers and report what they said. Our archive also holds the UNFCCC's published lists of participants; we never link them to our notes, list names from them, or show them to our team.
• These documents are their publishers' record, not ours. We hold them unaltered, to read, search and cite, under each publisher's own terms, and we do not republish them.
• We do not build a record of any person from them: no profile, list, index or count by name, no link from a name to a delegation, and no connection between a name in a document and our own notes. The published reporting is held outside our tool today; it will be searchable inside it only once that search declines a query for a person by name.

On what basis, and with what safeguards

The lawful basis is legitimate interests in scientific research (Article 6(1)(f) of the General Data Protection Regulation), with the safeguards for research in Article 89(1): no names are recorded, access is limited in the database itself, the controller's account signs in in two steps, the researchers are pseudonymised in any dataset that leaves the team, and third-party documents are never republished. We have not written to each person individually, because for research of this kind that would be a disproportionate effort (Article 14(5)(b)); this page is how we tell you instead. Nothing is decided about you by automated means.

Where it is held, and for how long

Everything is stored in the European Union: in Ireland for the database and the application, and in Germany for encrypted backups and for our email, including anything you write to us. Notes are kept while the research programme continues and are reviewed every ten years, when they are kept, anonymised or deleted, and the decision is written down. The documents are held for as long as the research uses them, and are never republished.

Your rights

You may ask what we hold about you and have it corrected. You may object to the processing, and ask for it to be erased or restricted, within the limits the law sets for research; we answer in writing and say why. Write to contact@bracketresearch.org; we reply within one month. You may also complain to a data protection authority: in France, the CNIL (https://www.cnil.fr), or the authority where you live or work.