Privacy Policy

Shared Visionings operates the Accelerated Research Platform, which collects first-person video accounts of work and employment experiences. We are the organization responsible for the information you provide — in data-protection terms, the data controller.

Questions, requests, or complaints: privacy@accelerated-research.net.

Participation is by invitation. When you take part, we collect:

• Your consent choices — how you wish to be named, which uses you approve, and the name you type as a signature, with the date and time.
• Details you enter — your name, email address, and optionally a phone number, pseudonym, industry, job role, location, LinkedIn address, and a short summary of your experience. Only your name and email are required.
• Your video recordings — five short answers, recorded in your browser, along with their length.
• A written transcript of what you say, produced automatically from the audio.
• Automated analysis — themes, an industry classification, a timeline of events, quoted claims, and flags marking anything sensitive that a reviewer should look at carefully.

We do not use advertising trackers or third-party analytics on the participant pages.

To build a documented record of employment experiences that journalists, attorneys, researchers, and policy advocates can draw on — but only in the ways you approve. Your contact details are used to reach you about your own contribution: confirming receipt, asking a follow-up question, or telling you about a change.

Our legal basis for handling this information is your consent. You can withdraw that consent at any time (see below), and doing so does not affect anything that happened before you withdrew.

After you upload, your recordings are sent to two service providers: a transcription service converts the audio to text, and an AI service reads that transcript and suggests themes, a timeline, and flags for anything sensitive.

These tools only ever suggest. No decision about publishing your story is made automatically — a person at Shared Visionings reviews the video, the transcript, and the suggested tags, and decides whether to approve, flag, or reject it. Nothing reaches a partner organization without that human approval.

Our review team. Staff verifiers can see everything you submit, including your contact details, in order to check and approve it.

Approved partner organizations, and only those matching the uses you allowed:

• Journalism — verified reporters may quote and reference your account.
• Legal — civil rights attorneys may use it to identify systemic patterns.
• Academic — researchers may include it in qualitative datasets.
• Policy — advocates may use it as evidence in policy work.

If you approve only journalism, only journalists can see your story. This is enforced by the database itself: a partner outside the scope you approved cannot retrieve your submission at all. Partners see your story under the name you chose — if you selected a pseudonym or first name only, your full name and contact details are not shown to them.

Service providers who process data on our behalf, under contract: our hosting and database provider, our transcription provider, our AI analysis provider, and our email provider. They may not use your information for their own purposes.

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it for advertising.

Your recordings are held in private storage that is not publicly browsable. Data is encrypted in transit and encrypted at rest by our hosting provider. Access is restricted by database-level security rules, so being signed in is not by itself enough to see a story — the rules check your role and the specific permissions attached to it.

When an approved partner watches your video, the system issues a temporary private link. That link is valid for up to 14 days and is not usable by anyone it wasn't issued to.

No system is perfectly secure. We limit who can access contributions, keep an audit log of actions taken on them, and review that log.

We keep contributions for seven years from the date you submit, unless you ask us to remove yours sooner. We record a deletion date for every contribution when you submit it, and delete contributions once that date passes. You do not have to wait for it — you can withdraw at any time, and that takes effect immediately.

If you withdraw, we keep a minimal anonymous record that you once participated and withdrew — with your name, email, phone number, pseudonym, and LinkedIn address erased. We keep this so we can demonstrate that your withdrawal was honored.

You can withdraw at any time, for any reason, without explaining why. Use the withdrawal link on your confirmation page, or email us at privacy@accelerated-research.net.

When you withdraw, immediately and automatically:

• Your story stops being visible to every partner.
• Your submission, transcript, tags, and review records are deleted from our database.
• Your name, email, phone number, pseudonym, and LinkedIn address are erased.
• Your video recordings are deleted from our storage.

Routine infrastructure backups may retain a copy for a short period before they age out. If you would like written confirmation once deletion is complete, email us and we will confirm.

We cannot retract material a partner lawfully published before you withdrew — a published article stays published. Withdrawing stops any further use from that point on.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask us to:

• Give you a copy of the information we hold about you.
• Correct anything inaccurate.
• Delete your information.
• Restrict or object to how we use it.
• Withdraw your consent.
• Change which uses you allow, at any time.

Email privacy@accelerated-research.net and we will respond within 30 days. Exercising these rights costs nothing, and we will not treat you differently for doing so.

If you are in the UK or EU and are unhappy with our response, you may complain to your national data protection authority.

This project is for adults. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a minor has contributed, contact us and we will delete the contribution.

If we change how we handle contributions in a way that materially affects you, we will update this page and email participants whose stories are still held. The date at the top always reflects the current version.

Shared Visionings — privacy@accelerated-research.net