Privacy Policy

The Layoff Exercise asks participants to rank candidates in a fictional layoff scenario, to support classroom discussion of decision-making criteria and fairness.

Controller

The controller within the meaning of Art. 4(7) GDPR is
Urs Müller, Gotenstr. 21, 10829 Berlin, Germany — info@layoff-exercise.org.

Who is responsible for what. For educator and administrator accounts, for security and abuse prevention, and for the retained analysis data — anonymous counters in some tools, pseudonymous rows in others; each tool's retention section says which — we are the controller. Where an institution has contracted us to run this tool for its own programme, the institution is the controller for the identifiable data of that cohort, and we process it on the institution's behalf (Art. 28 GDPR). In practice: for a request concerning your cohort's identifiable data, please approach your educator or institution first; for anything concerning accounts, security or the retained analysis data, contact us. We assist the institution in answering requests in either case (Art. 28(3)(e) GDPR).

Data protection officer: no data protection officer is appointed. § 38 BDSG has three separate triggers and we have assessed all three: headcount (at least 20 persons constantly engaged in automated processing — this service is operated by one person), processing that requires a data protection impact assessment under Art. 35 GDPR, and commercial processing for the purpose of transfer, anonymised transfer, or market or opinion research. The last two apply regardless of headcount. Our assessment is recorded in DPIA-DETERMINATION.md and is revisited whenever the scope or purpose of processing changes — in particular if cross-session research use becomes a purpose in its own right rather than support for the individual course.

What data we process

From participants

• E-mail address — required; identifies your submission and prevents duplicates.
• Session code — groups participants by session.
• Ranking decisions — your responses to the exercise.
• Optional demographics — only the fields you choose to answer.
• Submission timestamps.

From educators

• E-mail address — for backoffice sign-in.
• Password — stored only as a bcrypt hash.
• Session data — names, codes, configuration, responses.
• An audit record of backoffice actions — the educator's e-mail address and the IP address an action came from, stored as database records. This is a security record: it is how an account compromise is reconstructed. Records are deleted after 12 months.

Legal bases

• Running the exercise and the session debrief — Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in supporting the educational programme in which participants take part.
• Educator accounts — Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR.
• Security, rate-limiting and abuse prevention — Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR.

Recipients and third-country transfers

We use no third parties for advertising, analytics or tracking, and we do not sell or share personal data for marketing purposes. The following providers process data on our behalf as processors under a data processing agreement pursuant to Art. 28 GDPR:

• IONOS SE (Germany) — hosting and outgoing e-mail.
• Microsoft Ireland Operations Ltd. (OneDrive) — storage of the weekly off-site backup copies. Those backups are encrypted before they leave the server, and the private key exists only on the operator's own machine — never at the provider. So Microsoft holds ciphertext it cannot read.
• healthchecks.io — monitoring that the backup run happened. Only status pings are sent ("run succeeded / failed"); no content and no participant data.

Transfers outside the EU/EEA: processing takes place in the EU; the servers and databases are in Germany. Two things are worth stating in full. Microsoft (OneDrive) provides for transfers outside the EEA under Art. 46 GDPR safeguards (EU standard contractual clauses) — what reaches it is only the backup copies, encrypted before they leave the server, whose key we do not hand over. And healthchecks.io runs infrastructure in the EU and the US, but receives only backup-run status pings: no participant data and no content.

What this means for erasure: when a record is deleted, a copy may remain inside backups until those expire: up to 14 days in the backups held on the server, and up to 30 days in the encrypted off-site copies. Backups are used only to restore the service after a failure, never for ordinary processing.

How long we keep data

• Automatic pseudonymisation: sessions are pseudonymised automatically 30 days after their last response (hourly check), whichever rounds the session ran. E-mail addresses are replaced by stable per-session labels; rankings, optional demographics, the session link and submission timestamps remain joined for aggregate analysis. These rows are not anonymous.
• Warnings and postponement: educators are warned 14 days before that date and may postpone it by 30 days, up to three times. Participants with an e-mail address are warned 7 days before. A later response moves the last-response anchor and causes fresh warnings for the new date.
• Unused sessions: a session nobody joins is deleted 90 days after it was created.
• Educator-triggered pseudonymisation: educators are asked to pseudonymise a session as soon as it is finished, and can do so at any time.
• Backoffice audit log: kept as database records and deleted after 12 months.

Who can see your data

• Educators see the participants of their own sessions (e-mail addresses) and the session's responses for the debrief. They can also open aggregate analytics across all sessions — combined figures only, with small groups suppressed, never another session's individual responses or addresses.
• The administrator has technical access for maintenance and security only.

Data security

• The server is located in Germany.
• All transmission is encrypted using HTTPS/TLS.
• Passwords are stored only as bcrypt hashes, never in plain text.
• Session cookies are signed and HTTP-only.
• Web fonts are served from our own server — no third-party CDNs, so no data flows to third parties when fonts load.
• IP addresses processed for rate-limiting are held in memory only and never written to the database.

Server log files

Our web server records standard access log entries: IP address, date and time, the resource requested, HTTP status, referrer and browser identifier. These logs are used solely to operate and secure the service, are not combined with other data, are not used to identify individuals or build profiles, and are rotated and deleted after 14 days. IP addresses processed for rate-limiting are held in memory only and never written to the database.

Administrative audit trail. If you use an educator account, we record security-relevant actions — successful and failed sign-ins, password changes and resets, creating, changing and deleting accounts, and deleting or anonymising session data — each with the time, the account's e-mail address and the IP address. The basis is our legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR) in being able to reconstruct unauthorised access to an account. These entries are deleted after 12 months. Participants are not affected.

Your rights

You have the following rights:

• Access (Art. 15 GDPR) — what data we hold about you.
• Rectification (Art. 16 GDPR) — correction of inaccurate data.
• Erasure (Art. 17 GDPR) — deletion of your personal data.
• Restriction of processing (Art. 18 GDPR).
• Data portability (Art. 20 GDPR) — your data in a structured, machine-readable format.
• Withdrawal of consent (Art. 7(3) GDPR) — at any time, with effect for the future, as easily as it was given.

Response time. We aim to respond to enquiries promptly. Requests concerning your personal data are answered within the period required by Art. 12(3) GDPR (one month at the latest).

Erasure and withdrawal on this tool

You can delete your own submission. The closing page shows a personal deletion link once. Opening it shows what would be removed and asks you to type a word to confirm; nothing happens until you do. It removes your rankings and your optional demographic answers.

If you no longer have your deletion link, ask for a new one at /withdrawal-link with the session code and the e-mail address you took part with. We send it to that address and nowhere else, and we answer the same way whether or not we hold it, so the page cannot be used to find out who took part. The new link replaces any earlier one, which stops working at that moment. We keep only a one-way fingerprint of these links, never the link itself, so a copy of our database gives nobody the power to delete your data — which is also why we cannot re-send the one you had.

The link keeps working after pseudonymisation, when your address has been replaced by a stable per-session label: the record is then pseudonymous rather than anonymous, and the link still deletes it. What we cannot do at that point is find it for you, because the address that pointed at it is gone. You can also write to us or to your educator at any time.

Whether you must provide data

Providing data is neither a statutory nor a contractual requirement, but an e-mail address is technically required to take part; without it a submission cannot be recorded. It does three things and nothing else: it stops the same person submitting twice, it lets you pick up where you left off on a different device, and it is where we send the warning before your answers are deleted and the link that deletes them yourself. We do not use it to contact you for anything else. Demographic fields are optional.

Supervisory authority

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority. The authority competent for our location is:

Berliner Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit
Alt-Moabit 59–61
10555 Berlin
Germany
www.datenschutz-berlin.de

Automated decision-making

No automated decision-making, including profiling, within the meaning of Art. 22 GDPR takes place.

Diese Datenschutzerklärung ist auch auf Deutsch verfügbar.