Legal Information
Drawbridge Drama — moral-judgment attribution study
Imprint (Legal Notice)
Information according to § 5 TMG (German Telemedia Act)
Responsible for content:
Urs Mueller
www.urs-mueller.com
Gotenstr. 21
10829 Berlin
Germany
Contact:
Email: admin(at)drawbridge-drama.org
Purpose: This website is operated for educational and academic-research purposes. It presents a brief illustrated narrative ("the Drawbridge Drama") and asks participants to attribute responsibility, in order to support classroom discussion of moral judgment, framing effects, and inter-individual variation.
Disclaimer: Despite careful content control, we assume no liability for the content of external links. Operators of linked pages are solely responsible for their content.
Privacy Policy (Data Protection)
Who is the data controller?
Urs Mueller, Gotenstr. 21, 10829 Berlin, Germany — admin(at)drawbridge-drama.org
What data do we collect?
From class participants
Drawbridge is designed to be fully anonymous. We do not collect, ask for, or store any of the following from participants:
- Name
- Email address
- Phone number
- IP address (used only in transient memory for rate-limiting; never written to the database)
- Account credentials
- Any other directly identifying information
We do store the following, all per submission, not per person:
- Class code — the code your educator gave you, so we can attribute the response to the correct class. The code is not linked to you.
- Story variant — which of the eight randomized story variants you saw
(e.g.
A1B1C1) and the three factor levels that compose it. - Your responses — your primary choice ("who is responsible?"), your choice-certainty rating, and any optional follow-up selections. If you choose "Other," your written explanation is stored as you typed it.
- Optional demographics — age bracket, gender, country/region where you spent most of your childhood, and whether you have seen the story before. All four fields are optional. We collect them only to allow aggregate analysis ("did under-30s differ from over-50s?") — never to identify you.
- Submission timestamp — the moment your response was recorded.
- Hash of your session cookie and User-Agent — short one-way hashes (32 hex characters), used solely to prevent the same browser from submitting twice. They are not reversible to a person, browser fingerprint, or IP address.
From baseline (Prolific) participants
For the externally collected baseline sample, we additionally store the Prolific participant ID issued by Prolific. We use it only to deduplicate responses (one submission per Prolific ID) and to honour Prolific's rule that a participant can withdraw via Prolific. The ID is opaque — it does not reveal a name, email, or location to us.
From educators and administrators (backoffice users)
- Email address — for backoffice authentication.
- Display name — shown next to classes you create.
- Password — stored as a bcrypt hash; cannot be reversed.
- Last-login timestamp.
- Class data — names, codes, and configuration of classes you create.
Legal basis for processing
- Operating the study and aggregate visualisations — Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, legitimate interest in supporting the educational programme in which class participants are enrolled. Because the data we hold is not directly identifying, the interference with participants' rights is minimal.
- Backoffice accounts for educators — Article 6(1)(b) GDPR, performance of the service contract under which the account was created.
- Academic-research use of aggregated, non-identifying response data — Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, legitimate interest in academic research; no identifying information is involved.
How do we protect your data?
- The application is hosted on a server in Germany.
- All data transmission is encrypted using HTTPS/TLS.
- Backoffice passwords are hashed using bcrypt.
- Session cookies are signed with a server-side secret and HTTP-only.
- Access to the backoffice is restricted to authorised educators and the administrator.
- No data is sold, shared with advertisers, or transferred to third parties.
Who has access to your data?
- Educators — see aggregate response counts and the anonymous response-level data for their own classes (the same fields the visualisations are built from). They cannot identify any participant because no identifying data is stored.
- Administrator — has technical access for maintenance, backups, and security purposes only.
- No third parties.
Data retention
- Class responses — retained without a fixed deletion schedule, because they contain no identifying information that could be misused. Retention is reviewed periodically and adjusted if no longer needed for the educational and research purpose.
- Baseline (Prolific) responses — retained as part of the academic research dataset. The Prolific ID is the only quasi-identifier and is held only for deduplication.
- Educator accounts — retained until deactivated or deleted by an administrator.
- Server access logs — rotated and removed by the host's standard schedule; not analysed for tracking.
Your rights under GDPR
You have the right to access, correct, delete, port, restrict processing of, or object to processing of your personal data, and to withdraw any consent you have given.
Important note for class participants: because we do not collect any directly identifying information, we have no way to locate "your" specific response in the dataset. The price of full anonymity is that we cannot retrieve, edit, or delete an individual response on your request. If this is a concern for you, please do not submit a response. The Prolific dedup ID stored for baseline participants can be used to delete the corresponding response on request.
To exercise your rights, contact: admin(at)drawbridge-drama.org
You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. In Germany:
Berliner Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit
www.datenschutz-berlin.de
Terms of Use
Permitted use
- This site is provided for educational and academic-research purposes.
- Each participant should complete the study at most once per class. Repeated submissions from the same browser are technically blocked, and Prolific submissions are deduplicated by Prolific ID.
- Educators are expected to handle the (anonymous) class data responsibly and in line with their institution's policies.
- Misuse — e.g. automated submission, attempting to extract data, harassment, unauthorised access — is prohibited.
Intellectual property
The Drawbridge Drama study design, factor configuration, story text in the form presented here, illustrations, scoring/visualisation logic, and source code are protected by copyright. The underlying narrative is a long-standing teaching parable in the public-discussion tradition; the implementation here is an original work. Commercial use or redistribution without permission is prohibited.
Limitation of liability
This tool is provided for reflective and educational purposes. It is not a validated psychometric instrument and must not be used for hiring, selection, promotion, or any other personnel decision-making. We make reasonable efforts to keep the service available and secure, but make no warranty of uninterrupted availability or fitness for any particular purpose, and we are not liable for decisions made on the basis of results, data loss due to technical failure, or third-party access resulting from security breaches beyond our control.
Changes to these terms
These terms may be updated occasionally. The "Last updated" date below indicates the current version. Continued use of the service constitutes acceptance of the current terms.
Governing law
These terms are governed by German law. Place of jurisdiction is Berlin, Germany, to the extent permitted by law.
Contact for Legal & Data Protection Matters
For questions about your data, to exercise your rights, or for legal inquiries:
Email: admin(at)drawbridge-drama.org
Response time: within 5 business days.