Data Sovereignty
Privacy, Preservation and Research Use
Personal Sovereignty is designed around a simple principle: a person's private responses remain their record.
Using Personal Sovereignty does not by itself give Trauma in Religion, TFYQA.biz, The Blue•Print Project, a researcher, institution or other third party permission to publish, disclose or use a person's private responses for research.
These provisions should be read together with the coordinating Copyright, Data Sovereignty, Preservation and Research Use statement:
Trauma in Religion — Copyright, Data Sovereignty, Preservation and Research Use
The core rule
A private Personal Sovereignty response does not become public, research data or project property merely because it has been entered or saved.
1. What Personal Sovereignty Holds
Personal Sovereignty may hold or generate material including:
• questionnaire answers;
• age or first-awareness responses;
• a person's own reflections and additional notes;
• dated saved response histories;
• comparisons between earlier and later responses;
• reports and exports created from saved responses; and
• narrative material, including a Personal Story or similar account generated from the person's own saved responses.
These records may concern experiences, beliefs, memories, uncertainty and changing understanding. They are therefore treated as personal material rather than ordinary public website content.
2. Reflective, Not Diagnostic
Personal Sovereignty questionnaires and generated Response Stories are intended as reflective tools.
They are not diagnostic instruments and do not establish why an experience occurred, what effect it caused, whether a particular condition exists, or whether one event caused a later condition.
A generated story should describe patterns actually present in the responses supplied by the person and should distinguish those recorded facts from interpretation.
3. Current Private Storage Model
Saved Personal Sovereignty responses are intended to be stored outside the publicly accessible Trauma in Religion website.
The current response-history system associates saved responses with a random browser identifier rather than requiring a person's name or email address for ordinary response storage.
The response record itself is designed not to store a person's name, email address, IP address or browser User-Agent as part of the saved questionnaire record.
A browser cookie is used so that the same browser can find the history associated with its random identifier.
Current limitation
A cross-browser or cross-device recovery system has not yet been implemented. Until such a recovery system exists, a saved history should not be treated as the person's only durable copy.
4. Working Responses and Saved History
A questionnaire may temporarily hold a working response while the person answers, reviews or edits it.
A saved response is different. Saving creates a dated historical record so that later changes do not silently rewrite the earlier saved response.
Where a person chooses to continue from a previously saved response, the previous record remains part of the history and a later save creates another dated record rather than altering the earlier one.
5. Control Over Personal Records
The intended Personal Sovereignty model is that a person can, where the relevant function is available:
• answer privately;
• review what they have recorded;
• preserve dated versions;
• compare earlier and later responses;
• print or export a copy;
• selectively share a copy;
• optionally contribute selected material to research if a separate research facility is offered; and
• delete saved records that remain under the control of the Personal Sovereignty system.
6. Export and Copies
Personal Sovereignty may allow a person to create reports, printouts or files from their saved responses.
Once a person downloads, prints, emails or otherwise exports a copy, that copy exists outside the live Personal Sovereignty response store.
Deleting the live saved history cannot automatically retrieve or destroy copies that have already been downloaded, printed, emailed, backed up or supplied to another person.
A person should therefore consider the sensitivity of their responses before choosing where an exported copy is saved or who receives it.
7. Deletion and Starting Fresh
Where deletion controls are provided, a person may be able to:
• delete an individual saved response;
• delete the history for one questionnaire; or
• delete their Personal Sovereignty saved history and start fresh.
Deletion applies to records that remain within the live system and within the scope of that deletion process. It cannot recall external copies already retained elsewhere.
8. Private Records Are Not Automatically Research Data
Private Personal Sovereignty responses are not automatically included in research.
Merely completing a questionnaire, saving a response, generating a report or creating a Personal Story does not constitute consent to research use.
Research participation, if offered, should be a separate and deliberate choice. Declining research contribution should not prevent a person from using the ordinary Personal Sovereignty functions made available to them.
9. Optional Future Research Contribution
Personal Sovereignty is being developed with the possibility that some people may wish to preserve selected knowledge for legitimate research intended to benefit survivor/victims or improve understanding of childhood formation, coercion, memory, autonomy and related subjects.
If that facility is introduced, consent should identify what the person is agreeing to contribute.
Choices may include permission for:
• selected questionnaire answers to be included in aggregate analysis;
• selected de-identified records to be made available under controlled research access;
• selected de-identified quotations to be used;
• selected material to be preserved for future research;
• researchers to request contact through an intermediary, without automatically receiving the person's direct contact details; and
• selected material to remain available under defined research permissions after the contributor's death.
10. Research Must Not Become a Back Door
A research contribution should be created as a separately governed contribution or research copy.
Providing selected material for research does not give a researcher unrestricted access to:
• the contributor's complete questionnaire history;
• unrelated Personal Sovereignty records;
• private Blue•Print Vault material;
• unrelated TFYQA evidence records; or
• identifying information that was not included within the permission given.
11. Aggregate Statistics
If aggregate research statistics are later displayed within Personal Sovereignty, they should be based only on records validly contributed to the relevant research dataset.
Where practical, a statistic should identify the number of respondents on which it is based and should not imply that a self-selected Personal Sovereignty respondent group represents the wider population.
For example, a statement may describe the proportion of respondents in the Personal Sovereignty research dataset who selected a particular answer. It should not be presented as the proportion of all survivors, all religiously raised children or the general population unless an appropriate study actually supports that claim.
12. De-identification
Removing a person's name does not necessarily make detailed personal information anonymous.
Dates, institutions, locations, family relationships, unusual events, quotations and combinations of facts may still make a person recognisable.
For that reason, Personal Sovereignty uses the concept of de-identification rather than promising that every detailed record can be made completely anonymous.
Future research arrangements may therefore require aggregation, masking, pseudonymisation, restricted access or other safeguards in addition to removing direct identifiers.
13. Research Access
The existence of a research dataset does not create an entitlement for a researcher or institution to access it.
Where research access is later provided, conditions may include:
• a legitimate and clearly described research purpose;
• appropriate ethical review where required;
• appropriate competence or institutional accountability;
• secure information handling;
• use only for the approved purpose;
• no unauthorised onward disclosure;
• no attempt to identify or re-identify contributors;
• appropriate publication and quotation safeguards; and
• compliance with the consent governing the contributed material.
14. Withdrawal From Research
If research contribution is introduced, the withdrawal process and its practical limits should be explained when consent is obtained.
Material that remains under the control of the relevant research collection may be removed or restricted in accordance with the applicable consent and withdrawal process.
Withdrawal cannot necessarily undo completed aggregate analysis, retrieve copies already lawfully supplied under an authorised research arrangement, or remove information already incorporated into a completed or published research output.
15. Preservation Beyond a Contributor's Lifetime
Survivor knowledge can have value beyond the lifetime of the person who recorded it, but preservation after death should not be assumed merely because the information exists.
If a posthumous-preservation facility is introduced, a contributor should be able to record clear instructions about what selected material may be retained and for what purposes.
Possible choices may include deletion, continued private preservation, transfer to an authorised custodian, or continued availability under specifically recorded research permissions.
16. Relationship to TFYQA.biz and the Blue•Print Vault
Personal Sovereignty forms one part of a wider set of related projects.
TFYQA.biz may provide evidence, provenance or technical infrastructure. The Blue•Print Vault may provide a private environment for wider narrative, evidentiary and chronological records.
Movement or linkage between those systems must not silently change the permissions applying to a person's material.
A private Personal Sovereignty response remains private merely because it can technically be linked with another system.
17. Copyright and Material Created by the User
Entering or storing original material in Personal Sovereignty does not by itself transfer copyright in that material.
A person's original reflections, narrative writing and other original contributions remain subject to their rights unless a separate agreement expressly provides otherwise.
Software, page design, questionnaire wording and other original project material remain subject to the copyright and usage provisions identified in the coordinating Trauma in Religion statement.
18. No Sale of Personal Records
Personal records are not intended to be treated as a commodity for sale.
Private Personal Sovereignty material should not be sold or disclosed merely for commercial data aggregation.
Any future research partnership, preservation arrangement or institutional relationship must remain subject to the permissions governing the contributed material.
19. Security and Responsible Use
No online system can promise absolute security. Personal Sovereignty is intended to minimise unnecessary identifying information and separate private response storage from publicly accessible website material.
A person should also protect exported copies and devices through which private records can be accessed.
Unauthorised attempts to access, alter, extract, disclose or interfere with private records or access controls are not authorised by use of the site.
20. Development Status
Personal Sovereignty is an evolving project. Some functions described on this page are already operating, while others are design commitments for features still under development.
In particular, optional research contribution, controlled researcher access, posthumous instructions and cross-device recovery should not be assumed to exist until those functions are expressly made available within the system.
New features should be implemented consistently with the sovereignty principles on this page rather than using the existence of technically accessible data as implied permission.
21. Contact
Questions about Personal Sovereignty privacy, data control, research contribution, copyright or preservation may be directed to:
Email: john@tfyqa.biz
