Building Responsible AI Divides (“BRAID”, “the programme”, “we”, “our”, “us”) is committed to preserving your privacy. This statement outlines how BRAID uses and protects personal information that we collect from you. This privacy notice may be supplemented by additional privacy statements, terms or notices provided to you.
BRAID is administered by the University of Edinburgh, which is a registered charity, registration number SC005336. Your data will be held by the University of Edinburgh. To deliver the BRAID programme, we work in partnership with the Ada Lovelace Institute and BBC, and with our funder the Arts & Humanities Research Council. To properly administer the BRAID programme, we may be required to share personal information we collect from you with our partners.
1. Information about you
| Information we collect | Reasons for collecting it | Legal basis |
| Correspondence Information: Information you provide to us when you contact us or meet us in a business context: this may include your name, job title, organisation or academic institution you are associated with, contact details and address. | If you contact us to enquire about any aspect of our activities, we will collect your personal information in order to respond to your query appropriately.
If you are corresponding with us on behalf of a business, we may use this information to contact you about additional opportunities we think you might be interested in. |
On the basis of legitimate interest: to assist you with any queries you may have or inform you about our activities. |
| Contract Information: Information you provide to us when you enter (or wish to enter) a contract with us in relation to our activities, for example, where you apply to BRAID for funding or sign up to one of our events: this may include your name, address, contact details, and any information required to ensure your equitable participation i.e. any accessibility requirements you might wish us to alert us to like dietary requirements, wheelchair access or the need to receive information in a different format.
We may also require you to provide additional information to check eligibility criteria e.g. for our Accessibility Fund. In some instances this may include demographic information as detailed in the section below. |
If you enter a contract with us, we will collect your personal information to enable us to provide those services or take steps to assess whether we can enter the contract with you e.g. eligibility criteria.
We may collect accessibility requirements, including dietary requirements, to support you to participate comfortably and equitably in the activity. |
To fulfil our obligations under the contract or to carry out necessary steps prior to determining whether we can enter the contracts.
We will only collect this information on the basis of your consent. |
| Survey Information: BRAID may conduct surveys as part of its work. This may include your contact details, recordings of your participation in focus groups and information relating to matters of equity and participation and sense of belonging. | We will collect this information to help us improve our services and where relevant, ensure that they are effective in assisting individuals affected by barriers or disadvantages in the workplace. | On the basis of legitimate interest: ensuring that the use of our funding is effective, and demonstrates impact.
These surveys will be carried out on a voluntary basis; we will only collect this information where we have your consent to do so. |
| Testimonials/Case studies/follow-up information: Where you have received funding from BRAID, have collaborated with us, received a service from us or participated in an activity, we may contact you to ask about your experience of engaging with BRAID and the impact the opportunity has had.
In some instances this may include demographic information as detailed in the section below. |
This helps us to assess whether our activities, including our funding programmes are effective, and to report to our funders against agreed objectives.
We may also use the information to promote our activities (marketing purposes). |
On the basis of legitimate interest: ensuring that the use of our funding is effective, and demonstrates impact.
We will only identify you in marketing materials where you have consented to us doing so. |
| Demographic Information: Additional information you provide to us where you participate in BRAID activities.
This may include your gender, ethnicity, disability, career stage, occupation, organisation sector, industry you work in, area of residence or other demographic information. This information could contain special category data, e.g. ethnicity. |
This information helps us to assess whether our activities, are effective, and to report to our funders against agreed objectives relating to representation and inclusion of underrepresented groups in the field of responsible AI, broad reach across the UK, and across sectors and disciplines. | On the basis of legitimate interest: ensuring that the use of our funding is effective, and demonstrates impact.
Providing this information to us is always optional and requires your consent. Aggregated, anonymised data is used to monitor our progress towards our inclusion goals. Where any special category data is collected, on the basis of substantial public interest, we will seek your explicit consent. |
| Mailing list: Information that we collect about you when you sign up to our mailing list.
This may include your name and contact details. |
When you join our mailing list, we use your information to send BRAID news, events, opportunities and updates, including our monthly newsletter.
This allows us to communicate what is going on at BRAID and in the wider responsible AI community. |
We only send information where you have provided your consent.
You may unsubscribe at any time by following the link at the bottom of our correspondence. |
| Cookies Information: When visiting our website we gather some information using cookies. This includes your IP address, browser type, operating system and activity on our websites. | We use these cookies to improve your experience of using our website and to allow us to assess how visitors use our website. | Other than cookies which are necessary for the functioning of our website, we will use cookies only on the basis of your consent.
Please see the cookies section below for more information. |
| Photographs and videos: We may capture photographs or videos of you in the following circumstances: – where you have agreed to provide recordings or photographs as part of a contract with us; – where you have participated in our webinars or virtual events; and – where you have attended our events or partner events. You may also provide to us, existing photographs and videos e.g. a BRAID grant holder may provide a portrait of themselves for use in promoting their research project. |
We may use these photographs and videos to provide training/events and/or to promote the programme, our activities and events. | Where you agree to provide recordings or photographs as part of a contract with us, e.g. where we engage you to deliver a presentation or training course which will be recorded, this is on the basis of our contract.
Outside of the above, where we take photos or videos of you at our events, this is on the basis of legitimate interest, to promote our activities. We will only use these images or videos where we (or our event partners) have informed you beforehand and given you the opportunity to request not to be included. If you change your mind at any time please let us know. If you have provided us with photographs or videos of yourself for an agreed purpose, your providing them to us will be considered consent solely for the use described. |
2. Cookie Notice
As mentioned above, we collect some personal information, such as the IP address of your computer, through the use of website cookies. You can set your preferences for these cookies through our cookie banner.
What is a cookie?
A cookie is a small data file that certain websites write to your hard drive when you visit them. The only personal information a cookie can obtain is information a user supplies themselves. A cookie cannot read data from your hard disk or read cookie files created by other sites. Cookies, however, enhance our website performance in a number of ways, including providing a secure way for us to verify your identity during your visit to our website and personalise your experience on our website, making it more convenient for you.
What types of cookies do we use?
Necessary Cookies
These cookies are essential to enable you to move around the website and use its features. Without these cookies, we cannot provide some of the basic functionalities of our website. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.
Statistics Cookies
Statistic cookies help website owners to understand how visitors interact with websites by collecting and reporting information anonymously. For instance, which pages visitors go to most often, and the pages that they do not. This helps us to understand and improve the site. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data. We use Google Analytics to track the usage of our website and interaction with our newsletter.
How to block cookies
You can restrict or block cookies which are set during your use of the website by changing your browser’s settings. Some pages may not work if you completely disable cookies, but many third-party cookies can be safely blocked.
Check information in your browser’s help section for specific instructions on how to manage cookies. Alternatively, websites such as “All About Cookies” provide comprehensive guidance.
Guide to managing cookies (link to url: All About Cookies | Online Privacy and Digital Security)
3. Sharing tools and Links to Third Party Websites
We do not currently use sharing tools.
As we want your experience of our website to be as informative and useful as possible, we provide a number of links to websites operated by third parties e.g. to BRAID projects hosted at institutions across the UK.
Please be aware that we do not have any control over third-party websites and that such third-party websites may send their own cookies to users, or otherwise collect data or solicit personal information.
We cannot be responsible for the protection and privacy of any information you provide whilst visiting such third-party websites and so these are not governed by this privacy policy. We encourage you to review each third-party website’s privacy policy before browsing and interacting with the website in question.
4. Retention of your information
We will retain your personal information for as long as we reasonably require in light of the purpose(s) for which we are holding it and all relevant legal, commercial and operational considerations.
We may have to comply with statutory retention periods as required by our funders.
5. Disclosure of your information
We will never sell or trade your personal information to others.
We use third-party service providers and suppliers to deliver certain services. We put contractual arrangements in place with these third parties to ensure they are obliged to protect your personal information.
We only share your personal information where it is reasonably necessary to properly administer our activities and/or to comply with law/regulations.
The following third parties may have access to your personal information:
- Software providers – we use certain software providers to enable us to administer our activities, these providers include, but are not limited to the providers of our newsletter, events management, contact management system and the host of our website.
- Event organisers – where we hold events we may need to share some of your personal information with third-party organisers of the event, for example, to put in place a guest list of ticket holders.
- Regulators, government departments, law enforcement authorities, tax authorities, accountants, insurance companies, professional advisers, dispute resolution bodies or the courts – where necessary to comply with law or enforce or rights; and
- Arts & Humanities Research Council– we have certain reporting duties to our funders.
- Our strategic partners – the Ada Lovelace Institute and the BBC.
- Consultants and service providers – we use third-party consultants and service providers where we require specialist assistance to deliver our services or where these are required on a short-term or ad hoc basis, this includes specialist training providers, marketing/technology specialists and recruitment specialists;
- Persons in connection with any re-organisation of BRAID.
Some of these entities may also be data controllers but please contact us in the first instance if you have any questions.
6. International Data Transfers
The information we collect from you may be stored inside the UK, the European Economic Area (“EEA”) or outside the EEA.
If you live or work outside of the EEA, we may need to transfer your personal information outside of the EEA to correspond with you. Where this applies, we will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your personal information is treated securely and in accordance with this privacy notice.
We may transfer personal information outside the EEA where our service providers host, process, or store personal information outside the EEA. Where this is the case we use contractual arrangements and safeguards to protect this personal information and ensure the transfer complies with applicable law.
7. Security
Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted online or through the website. Any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.
8. Updates to this privacy notice
We may further amend this privacy notice from time to time to take account of changes to our processing and regulatory changes. However, we will not without your consent use the personal information in a matter materially different to what was stated in the notice at the time your personal information was collected.
9. Continuation of the privacy notice
Please find the second part of our privacy notice here: Continued privacy notice | Data Protection (link to https://www.ed.ac.uk/data-protection/notice). This is the generic part of every University of Edinburgh privacy notice.
10. Contact Details
Please help us keep our records updated by informing us of any changes to your e-mail address and other contact details.
If you have any questions about this privacy notice, including if you wish to exercise any of your rights, please contact us at braid@ed.ac.uk with the subject line “privacy notice”.
This privacy notice was last updated on 29/07/2024 and is currently being reviewed.
