What Forks keeps

What happens when you scan the code

Your phone opens a web page and is given a number, like 47. That number is how the app tells one phone from another for the length of the session. There is no account to make, nothing to install, and nothing to type.

The number is not you. It is not linked to your phone number, your email address, your name, or anything else about you, because the app never asks for any of them.

What is kept afterwards

The answers do stay after the session ends. They were never attached to a name, so there is nothing to strip out of them. What is kept is:

• The choices made in the room. Which of the three options was chosen for each question, and how many people chose each one.
• The questions themselves, and how each one divided the room.
• Details of the session: the date, the town or campus, the organizer, the number of people, and the kind of group, such as students at a teachers college.
• How the rhymes turned out: how many people found somebody who made the same choice at every question, and how far the others walked with theirs.

It is used to make the tool better. A question that splits every room the same way is a weak question. A room where hardly anyone found a close rhyme tells us the set was wrong for its size. The facilitator who ran your session gets a report from it.

Some sessions keep nothing

Every session has a switch, and the facilitator decides. Where it is turned off, the answers exist only while the session runs, because finding each person's rhyme needs them, and are deleted when the session closes. That session is never used in research and never appears in anything published.

A room with anybody under 18 in it starts with the switch off. A school class is not a group anyone joins by choice, so the simplest answer is to keep nothing. Your facilitator can tell you which way your session is set.

How long, and where it might appear

Where the switch is on, the answers are kept indefinitely. They carry nobody's name, and a single afternoon says very little on its own: a question only shows itself as good or weak once many rooms have answered it.

Findings may be published openly rather than shown only to facilitators. What gets published is counts and patterns across rooms, never one person's six answers, and never at a level where a group is small enough for its members to recognize each other. Small sessions are combined with others first, and a small venue is described by its town rather than named.

If your group is a small one, the person who invited you should have told you this beforehand and asked whether you were happy with it. If they did not, say so, and it can be put right.

How your phone is told apart

The code on the screen is the same for everybody. When your phone opens the page, the app makes a new row, gives it a secret token and a number like 47, and hands the token back to your phone to keep. Your phone sends that token with each answer, which is how the app knows which answers belong together. It works like a cloakroom ticket: the ticket identifies the coat, not the person holding it.

The token is thrown away when the session ends, so the next session starts from nothing.

What arrives that we do not ask for

Every visit to any website carries a few things with it: the address your internet connection is using at that moment, which browser and phone you have, and the time. They arrive whether or not anybody wants them, and the companies that run the servers write them into technical logs.

Those logs are kept for a few days, for finding faults and stopping abuse, and then they go. They are never written into the session records, and nothing joins a log entry to an answer. Your internet address is never stored beside what you chose.

What is never kept

• Your name, email address or phone number. The app never asks.
• Anything you typed. There is nothing to type: every question has three choices and no box for your own words.
• Who your rhyme was, by name. The app shows you a number. Whether you go and talk to that person is your business, and the app never knows whether you did.
• Any profile of you. No type, no category and no score. If you come to a second session, nothing connects your answers there to your answers here, because there is no identifier to connect them by.

If you sign up for news of sessions

On the For participants page you can leave your email address to hear when a session opens to the public. That address, and the date you left it, are all that is kept. It is used only to tell you about sessions open to the public. It is never shared or sold, and it is never joined to anything you answer in a session.

When you sign up you are given a link that deletes your address. Once deleted, it is gone, not kept. You need to be 16 or older to sign up.

If you run sessions

Facilitators sign in to build and keep their sessions. That account is handled by Manaboodle, and what it stores, including which organizer you registered through, is set out in Manaboodle's privacy policy.

Questions about this

Ask the facilitator running your session, who can pass anything on. This page will say more once the full policy is written.