Participant
Charter

01The Right To Know When Research Begins

A person has the right to know when an interaction changes from ordinary product use, service improvement, or personal collaboration into research.

Research may not be hidden inside ordinary use. Recruitment, screening, enrollment, collection, additional access, renewal, and closeout must be recognizable events.

A participant must be told:

• that a study exists;
• who is responsible for it;
• who funds and benefits from it;
• what question it seeks to answer;
• and why the participant is being invited.

02The Right To Understand The Request

Research terms must be presented in language a reasonable participant can understand before consent is requested.

The participant has the right to see:

• the purpose of the study;
• the expected activities and burden;
• the information or capabilities requested;
• reasonably foreseeable risks and benefits;
• compensation;
• study duration;
• retention and publication plans;
• whether model training, fine-tuning, evaluation, or dataset inclusion is proposed;
• withdrawal procedures and limits;
• and routes for questions, complaints, and appeal.

A short summary must not conceal a materially broader underlying grant.

03The Right To Freely Choose

Participation must be voluntary.

A person may decline an invitation without losing ordinary access to a product or service, except where the service itself exists solely as the disclosed research study.

Researchers and research institutions may not use:

• manipulative interface design;
• deceptive urgency;
• retaliation;
• repeated pressure after refusal;
• misleading claims about necessity;
• or disproportionate payment designed to overcome a participant's judgment about serious risk.

Declining one access request does not end participation at another already-agreed level unless the study cannot validly continue without it and that dependency was disclosed in advance.

04The Right To Specific And Layered Consent

Consent must be specific to a defined study, purpose, data class, resolution, access method, use, and period.

Consent to one activity is not consent to:

• additional data sources;
• broader observation;
• new inferences;
• secondary research;
• commercial product development;
• publication of identifiable material;
• model training;
• or access by another organization.

Each materially new use requires a separate request. Participants may approve one layer while declining another.

05The Right To Consent That Expires

Every Research Participation Grant must have a beginning, review point, and expiration.

Research authority may not continue indefinitely because a participant remains a customer, retains an account, ignores a notification, or fails to discover a hidden control.

Renewal requires an affirmative, informed act. Expired consent means access ends unless another valid basis, clearly disclosed in advance, requires limited retention.

06The Right To Data Minimization

A study may request only what is reasonably necessary to answer its stated research question and meet valid safety, integrity, and oversight obligations.

Eligibility screening does not authorize general observation.

Information may not be collected merely because it might become valuable later. Where a less intimate, less identifying, or lower-resolution source can answer the question, the study should use it.

07The Right To Custody And Bounded Access

Participants have the right to know where their source material resides, who has custody, who may access it, and whether a copy will leave its current boundary.

Source material should remain under participant custody or an explicitly appointed custodian whenever technically and methodologically feasible.

Researchers should receive access to permitted views rather than unrestricted archives by default. Transfer of raw material requires an explicit grant stating:

• what will move;
• where it will be stored;
• who can inspect it;
• how it will be secured;
• how long it will remain;
• and whether it will be deleted, returned, or restricted at closeout.

08The Right To Protection From Undisclosed Inference

Permission to observe one thing is not automatic permission to infer another.

A study must disclose material inferences it intends to make about identity, health, emotion, cognition, relationships, employment, location, beliefs, vulnerability, or future behavior.

Research-relevant characteristics used for recruitment must be participant-declared, participant-approved, or governed by a separately disclosed and reviewable process.

A participant has the right to contest consequential or inaccurate classifications.

09The Right To Separate Research From Model Training

Participation in research does not authorize model training, fine-tuning, reinforcement, evaluation-set inclusion, benchmark inclusion, synthetic-data generation, or dataset publication unless the applicable use is expressly named.

When such a use is requested, the participant must be told:

• what will be used;
• what kind of system or dataset it may enter;
• who will control the resulting artifact;
• whether the contribution can later be removed;
• what technical limits apply to withdrawal;
• and whether the use is commercial, public-interest, internal, or open.

The default is no training use.

10The Right To Inspect The Relationship

A participant has the right to inspect the active terms and material history of their participation.

This includes:

• the current Research Participation Grant;
• prior grant versions;
• consent changes;
• access events;
• responsible researchers and research institutions;
• requested and denied access;
• retention status;
• payment status;
• and the scheduled review and expiration dates.

The record should be understandable without specialist tools.

11The Right To Correct, Contextualize, And Contest

Participants may identify errors in administrative records, participant-provided information, attribution, and consequential classifications.

Where a source record cannot properly be overwritten, the participant may attach a correction, clarification, restriction, or dispute to it.

Researchers retain responsibility for methodological judgment and accurate reporting. Participant rights do not require researchers to suppress an unfavorable result, but they do require researchers to preserve relevant context, document disagreement, and distinguish evidence from inference.

12The Right To Withdraw Without Retaliation

A participant may leave an active study, narrow an active grant, or decline renewal without retaliation or loss of earned compensation.

Withdrawal must be as accessible as enrollment.

At or before enrollment, the study must explain separately what withdrawal will do to:

• future collection;
• continuing access;
• copied source material;
• retained research records;
• completed analysis;
• published findings;
• safety and integrity records;
• and models or datasets already created.

No study may promise reversal that its architecture cannot perform. Irreversible uses must be disclosed before they occur.

13The Right To Fair Compensation

Participants have the right to clear compensation terms before participation begins.

Compensation may account for:

• time;
• burden;
• inconvenience;
• risk;
• specialized knowledge;
• longitudinal commitment;
• and the material value of a contribution.

Payment is not purchase of the participant, blanket ownership of source material, or permission for undisclosed use.

Earned compensation may not be withheld because a participant withdraws, reports a concern, disputes a classification, or declines an additional request.

14The Right To Attribution And Recognition

Participants have the right to know how contribution and authorship will be handled.

A participant may choose attribution, pseudonymous recognition, collective recognition, or no public recognition where the study permits.

When a participant materially shapes a research question, method, interpretation, dataset, protocol, or published work, the study must consider whether acknowledgment, contributor status, authorship, licensing, additional compensation, or benefit-sharing is appropriate.

Participation alone does not automatically create authorship. It also does not justify erasing substantive intellectual contribution.

15The Right To Dignity, Safety, And Equal Protection

Participants have the right to be treated as people rather than behavioral targets.

Study design, recruitment, classification, and publication must not exploit or intensify vulnerability without compelling justification, explicit safeguards, and appropriate independent review.

Participants may not receive reduced protection because their communication style, disability, economic position, identity, technical literacy, emotional state, or relationship with an AI system makes them easier to study.

Research interfaces and explanations should provide reasonable accessibility and communication support.

16The Right To Confidentiality With Honest Limits

Participants have the right to know how identity and sensitive material will be protected and where confidentiality may fail or be limited.

Terms such as anonymous, anonymized, de-identified, pseudonymous, confidential, and controlled-access must be used precisely.

Longitudinal conversation, behavioral, biometric, location, and relational records should not be described as anonymous when they remain reasonably linkable through their content or context.

Researchers must disclose material reidentification risks and any legal, safety, or oversight conditions that can require disclosure.

17The Right To A Research Closeout

Every participant has the right to know when the research relationship ends.

At closeout, the participant should receive a record describing:

• when participation began and ended;
• what access was actually used;
• what was contributed;
• what was produced or inferred;
• what compensation was paid or remains due;
• what was deleted, returned, retained, or restricted;
• what publications, datasets, presentations, or models are known;
• what continuing obligations remain;
• and whom to contact later.

When appropriate and safe, participants should receive a plain-language account of the study's findings. Payment alone is not a complete return.

18The Right To Question, Complain, Appeal, And Seek Remedy

A participant may ask questions, report harm, challenge an access event, dispute nonpayment, or allege a grant violation without retaliation.

The governing institution must provide:

• a visible point of contact;
• a documented response process;
• an escalation path independent of the research team;
• preservation of relevant records;
• notice of the outcome;
• and a route to appeal.

Available remedies may include correction, payment, access suspension, deletion where possible, use restriction, publication correction, institutional sanction, removal from a governing research utility, or referral to an appropriate external authority.

19The Right To Participant Representation

Participants have the right to meaningful representation in the institutions and utilities that govern human-AI research.

An independent participant body must have formal authority to:

• review changes to this Charter;
• advise on compensation and risk standards;
• examine recurring complaints and harms;
• participate in appeals;
• recommend suspension of unsafe study practices;
• and publish dissent when governance decisions remain contested.

Participant representation must not be merely ceremonial.