Privacy statement

Date: 30 October 2026

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (hereinafter: "VU") attaches great importance to the protection of your privacy and the security of your personal data. In this privacy statement we describe how we handle your personal data in the research study "Futures of Maths", an anonymous community consultation of researchers in mathematics and related fields about the use and governance of AI in mathematical research and teaching. We process your personal data in accordance with applicable privacy legislation, including the General Data Protection Regulation (hereinafter: "GDPR") and the Dutch GDPR Implementation Act (Uitvoeringswet AVG).

Who is responsible for the processing of my personal data?

Stichting VU is responsible for the data processing operations described in this privacy statement. Stichting VU maintains Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam as a privately run university in accordance with the Higher Education and Research Act of the Netherlands (Wet op het hoger onderwijs en wetenschappelijk onderzoek). Stichting VU has its registered office at De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and is registered with the Chamber of Commerce under number 53815211. The study is led by Jon Roozenbeek of the Department of Communication Science.

How the study is designed to protect you

The study uses two separate websites with separate databases:

• the verification website (https://verify.futuresofmaths.com) checks that you are a researcher and then gives your browser an anonymous one-time pass;
• the consultation website (https://community.futuresofmaths.com) accepts the pass and records your responses. It never receives your name, email address, ORCID iD or anything the verification website or the verification moderator saw.

The pass is created with a blind signature (RFC 9474): your browser creates a random pass and hides it before the verification website signs it, so the verification website never sees the pass it signs. As a result, nobody, including the research team and the verification moderator, can link consultation responses to the person who was verified.

What (categories of) personal data will be processed?

On the verification website:

1. if you sign in with ORCID: your ORCID iD and the public list of works on your ORCID record, used in memory for the eligibility check and not stored. We send the DOIs (publication identifiers) of the journal articles that Crossref added to your record and that were published in the last three years, but not your iD or name, to zbMATH Open to check that at least one is in mathematics or a related field;
2. if you ask for a manual review: your email address, your ORCID iD if you give one, the details of your article, your message, and any proof of the article or of your authorship that you email to the verification moderator (for example a forwarded acceptance email). These go by email to the moderator, the verification moderator, and are not stored on the website;
3. a keyed one-way hash of your ORCID iD or, after a manual review, of your email address (and of your ORCID iD if you gave one), and the sign-in method. These are used only to make sure that each person receives one pass. For an approved manual review we also keep a hash of your email address and the approval date until you collect your pass.

On the consultation website, under a random code:

4. your ratings of statements (from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree", or skipped), which statements you mark as exceptionally important, and for each statement its position in your feed and the probability with which it was chosen for that position (used to correct the analysis for the order in which statements were shown). Your karma points are calculated from these data when you view them, and when the research team downloads the data, where they appear next to your participant code; they are not stored separately. Your views on how AI should be governed may reveal opinions that some regard as political, which is a special category of personal data under Article 9 of the GDPR;
5. your answers to select-all questions: the options you ticked (or that you chose "None of these", or skipped the question), the order in which the options were shown to you (shuffled for each participant), and the question's position in your feed and the probability with which it was chosen for that position;
6. your answers to ranking questions: the options you ranked, in your order (or that you skipped the question), the order in which the options were shown to you (shuffled for each participant) and the position in your feed at which the question appeared;
7. statements you write, before and after moderation, marked with your random participant code;
8. if you choose to answer them, your answers about yourself: where you are based, as a broad world region or, for some countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, China and India, the country; academic position, type of institution, department, research fields and any text you type under "Other";
9. a hash of your pass, so that you can return with your link and each pass can be used by one person only, and the month in which you joined and consented.

Both websites set only strictly necessary cookies (see the cookie notice). Our websites do not record IP addresses, device identifiers or exact times. Like any website, our hosting provider necessarily receives your IP address to deliver the pages to you; it does not pass it to us.

For which purposes are my personal data processed, and on the basis of which legal grounds?

The personal data will only be used for the following purposes:

1. checking that participants are researchers in mathematics or a related field, and that each person takes part only once (data a to c);
2. scientific research, specifically social science research into mathematicians' attitudes to the use and governance of AI in research and teaching (data d to g);
3. publishing the results of this research, including a de-identified dataset, as described below.

We process your personal data on the basis of the following legal grounds:

• For the consultation (purposes b and c), you have given consent to the processing of your personal data (GDPR Article 6(1)(a)), and explicit consent for any special category data such as views revealing political opinions (Article 9(2)(a)). You have the right to withdraw your consent at any time; see "How can I exercise my privacy rights?" below.
• For verification (purpose a), the processing is necessary for the purpose of pursuing our legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)). These legitimate interests consist of ensuring the scientific validity of the study by limiting it to researchers in mathematics and related fields and allowing each person to take part only once. You can object to this processing by contacting us, or choose not to take part.

What will happen to my consultation responses?

1. While the consultation is open, your ratings, importance ticks, answers to select-all questions, rankings, the statements you write and your optional answers about yourself are stored in the consultation database, on servers of Scaleway SAS in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. They are stored under a random code, not under your name, email address or ORCID iD, which the consultation database never receives.
2. Statements you write are read by the content moderators (mostly members of the research team), who may lightly edit them for clarity or to remove identifying details, and are then shown, without your name or code, to other participants to rate. In the research files, each statement you write is marked with your random participant code, so that the research team can study how authors rate statements, including their own. Statements may be quoted in publications and included in the published dataset.
3. What other participants see. After answering a statement, participants see how everyone has rated it so far, as percentages, and how many people have answered it. These summaries appear only once at least 5 people have answered the statement (and at least 5 have rated it, for the percentages), so that no one's answer can be read from them. The same applies to select-all questions, where participants see the share of people who ticked each option, and to ranking questions, where they see the combined ranking of everyone, in both cases only once at least 5 people have answered. Nobody sees another participant's individual ratings or rankings, and participants never see who wrote a statement.
4. The research team (Francesco Fournier-Facio, Yara Kyrychenko and Julian Wykowski) downloads the responses as spreadsheets for analysis and keeps them on password-protected, encrypted computers and university storage. In these files each participant is identified by a random participant code, which is not your name, email address or ORCID iD and cannot be traced back to them. The same code marks the statements you wrote, and the files also include your karma points. Answers about yourself are included only where at least 5 participants share the same combination of answers; otherwise they are replaced with "suppressed". Text you type under "Other" is not included; the research team may give it a short general category (for example "Philosophy"), and only that category is included.
5. Analysis. We calculate how much participants agree with each statement and how important they find it, combine participants' rankings with standard voting methods (such as the Schulze and Borda methods), and we use statistics to find groups of participants who rate statements in similar ways and the statements these groups agree or disagree on. This is done on the whole dataset; no decision is made about any individual.
6. Publication. Results are published in academic articles, reports and presentations as summaries, such as percentages and averages. A de-identified dataset (ratings, importance ticks, select-all answers, rankings, statements and the protected answers about participants) may be published openly on the Open Science Framework (OSF) or DataverseNL, so that other researchers can check and reuse it. The published dataset does not show which participant wrote which statement, and does not include karma points, from which this could be worked out.
7. After the consultation closes, the online databases are deleted within 30 days of the end of the consultation, once the research data has been copied to secure VU Amsterdam storage. The de-identified research data is kept for at least 10 years after the last publication based on it, in line with VU Amsterdam research data policy.
8. We will not sell your responses, use them for any purpose other than this research, or try to find out who you are.

Who has access to my personal data?

The personal data will only be accessed by employees of the VU, and researchers working with them on this study, who by reason of their function have a role in the processing of your personal data for the above purposes and for whom access is necessary. These are the principal investigator, Jon Roozenbeek (VU Amsterdam and University of Cambridge), and the research team, Francesco Fournier-Facio (Heriot-Watt University), Yara Kyrychenko (University of Cambridge) and Julian Wykowski (KIT).

Two kinds of moderator have narrower roles. Content moderators (mostly members of the research team) see the statements participants post, before and after editing, so that they can check them before they appear, but not who wrote them. Content moderators who are not part of the research team use a separate login that shows only these statements, and no other consultation data. Manual review applications are seen only by the moderator, the verification moderator, who is not part of the research team and never sees consultation responses.

Some of these people, including members of the research team and the verification moderator, may work from the United Kingdom and access the data from there. The next sections explain what this means.

Will my personal data be shared with third parties?

When processing your personal data, we use service providers (processors) who process your personal data on our behalf. We remain solely responsible for these processing activities. Our processors are:

• Scaleway SAS (France), which hosts both websites and their databases in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and sends manual review applications to the verification moderator from Paris, France. Scaleway's email activity log records the recipient (the verification moderator), the subject and the time. Your email address is never a recipient of this service: the verification moderator sends sign-in links from their own mailbox, in reply to your application;
• the moderator, the verification moderator, who checks manual review applications on our behalf. The verification moderator only verifies eligibility, never sees consultation responses, and deletes your application once a decision is made, and in any case when the consultation closes.

The following personal data are shared with other organisations, only if you choose to sign in with ORCID:

• ORCID, Inc. (United States): you sign in at ORCID directly, and our server then sends your ORCID iD to ORCID's public API to read your public record. ORCID's own privacy policy applies to your use of ORCID;
• FIZ Karlsruhe (Germany), which runs zbMATH Open: we send the DOIs of articles on your record, without your iD or name.

These checks are needed for verification (purpose a). If you prefer, you can ask for a manual review instead.

The de-identified research dataset described above may be published openly on the Open Science Framework (OSF) or DataverseNL. Your personal data will not be shared with other parties. Should this be the case at any time, we will inform you of this. We only disclose personal data to third parties to the extent permitted by privacy law, for example because you have given your prior consent or we are legally obliged to do so.

Will my personal data be transferred to countries outside of the European Economic Area?

The European Economic Area (EEA) includes all EU countries plus Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland. Our websites, databases and email service are all in the EEA. Your personal data may be transferred outside the EEA in two cases:

• United Kingdom. Members of the research team and the verification moderator may work from the United Kingdom. From there, the research team may access the consultation and research data held in the EEA, for example through the admin pages or data exports, and the verification moderator may read manual review applications and reply to them. The European Commission has decided that the United Kingdom protects personal data to a standard essentially equivalent to the EU's (an adequacy decision, renewed in December 2025), so personal data may be transferred there without further safeguards.
• United States, only if you sign in with ORCID. Your ORCID iD is sent to ORCID, Inc. in the United States to read your public record, which ORCID already holds. ORCID states in its privacy policy that it protects personal data transferred from the EEA with the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses. If you do not want your ORCID iD sent to the United States, please use manual review.

For how long will my personal data be retained?

We will not retain your personal data for longer than is necessary to achieve the predetermined purposes or as long as required by law.

How will my personal data be secured?

The VU takes appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your personal data against loss and any form of unlawful processing. For this study these include:

• separate verification and consultation websites and databases, linked only by a blind-signed anonymous pass;
• storing identifiers only as keyed one-way hashes, and deleting them after the consultation;
• no logging of IP addresses, device identifiers or exact times, and dates stored only to the month;
• encrypted connections (HTTPS) for all traffic, and encrypted connections between the websites and their databases over a private network;
• password-protected access to the research team's administration pages and to research data;
• in downloaded data, random participant codes instead of database identifiers, suppression of any combination of answers about participants shared by fewer than 5 people, and no free-text "Other" answers;
• checking of participant-written statements by content moderators to remove identifying details before they are shown to others or published;
• not publishing which participant wrote which statement, or karma points;
• showing participants summaries of how others voted on a statement or ranking question only once at least 5 people have answered it, and never anyone's individual ratings or rankings.

Who can I contact with questions about the processing of my personal data?

You can ask questions about how we process your personal data via futuresofmaths@tutamail.com.

How can I exercise my privacy rights?

On the basis of the GDPR you have the right, under certain conditions, to access your personal data that we process, to correct your personal data if it contains factual inaccuracies, to delete your personal data, to limit the processing of your personal data, to portability of your personal data and to object to the processing of your personal data. Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time.

Consultation responses. While you have your consultation link, you can delete all your ratings, select-all answers, rankings and answers about yourself at any time with "Withdraw my answers" on the "My session" page. Statements you wrote stay in the study, but the link between them and your participant code is deleted. Because the study is designed so that responses cannot be linked to anyone, once you no longer have your link we cannot identify your responses, so we cannot give you access to them, correct them or delete them on request (GDPR Article 11). This is a deliberate privacy protection.

Verification data. To exercise your rights over your verification data, contact futuresofmaths@tutamail.com.

If you wish to exercise any of these privacy rights, you can also contact the Data Protection Officer of VU Amsterdam via:

Data Protection Officer
De Boelelaan 1105
1081 HV Amsterdam
functionarisgegevensbescherming@vu.nl

To be able to deal with your request, you may be asked to identify yourself on the basis of additional personal data that the VU has of you. If this method of identification is not possible, you may be asked to identify yourself with an identification card. In this way it will be verified that the request has been made by the right person. If you are not satisfied with the way in which we deal with your personal data, you always have the right to submit a complaint to a supervisory authority, such as the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens) or the authority in the country where you live or work.

Cookies

See our cookie notice. We use only strictly necessary cookies.