DEPRECIATED — User Research Confidentiality Agreement

Note, that the below was developed in 2018 by Bernard Tyers (who is awesome!), prior to establishing stricter opsec particulars, now a part of the UxR Participant Disclosure Doc (restricted to FPF access, only).

Dear [name],

Thank you for considering to participate in SecureDrop user research. As part of this process, we want to reassure you that we take our confidentiality obligations to you extremely seriously.

To sum up: We will regard everything you tell us as confidential. We will send you the audio recording and its checksum, and we ask you to authorize the transcript or redact it as you see fit. We then delete our copy of the audio recording.

To break it down in more detail:

With your permission, we will record the audio of our conversation
~~We will send you a copy of the audio recording~~ not necessary
We then transcribe the audio
We will send you the transcript to make sure we’ve not misrepresented what you’ve said
We will include in the transcript document a checksum of the audio file, so both parties can later re-verify the recording if needed
You have the right to request anything to be removed from the transcript
After you sign off on the transcript, we delete our copy of the audio recording
All we keep is a digitally signed version of this promise to you, the transcript, your email authorizing it, and the checksum of the audio file
We will handle the transcript in line with our research guidelines: User-Research-Guidelines