Legal
Consent
Version consent.v1 · last updated 25 August 2026
This is the exact text shown before and after the assessment. It is published here so that you can read it without starting again, and so that anyone checking our data releases can verify what we were actually given permission to do.
Why the version number matters
Every response stores which consent version was in force and a hash of the text itself. If we change this wording, a new version is created and your responses stay governed by the text you were actually shown. Consent is never applied retroactively, in either direction.
1.Before you start
This is a personality assessment run as an open research project. It takes about 40 minutes for the full form. You must be 18 or over.
We do not ask for your name or email. When you finish you get a link to your results, and that link is the only way back to them. We cannot recover it for you, because we hold nothing that identifies you and no copy of the link.
This is not a clinical or diagnostic instrument and must not be used to make decisions about anybody, including yourself, that you would not make anyway.
Part of what you will answer is experimental. It measures something no existing instrument measures, and it may turn out to measure nothing. If that happens we will publish that result rather than quietly removing it.
2.The three checkboxes
Only the first is required. Declining any of the others does not affect your results, your experience, or anything else you can see.
consent_participateI am 18 or over. I understand what this is and what it is not, and I agree that my answers may be stored so that they can be scored and shown back to me.
Declining this means there is nothing to score, so this is the one that cannot be optional.
consent_aggregateMy answers may be included in group statistics published on this site — distributions, averages, correlations. Nothing that could identify me is published, and four separate rules exist to keep it that way.
If you decline: your responses are excluded from every figure on /explore and from the aggregate download.
consent_datasetMy item-level answers may be included in the openly released dataset, without anything that identifies me, under a public-domain licence so that any researcher can use them.
If you decline: excluded from every release, permanently. This is separate from the statistics checkbox because a released file cannot be recalled once someone has downloaded it, and that is a materially different thing to agree to.
There used to be a fourth box, asking permission to contact you about follow-up research. It has been removed, because there was no mechanism behind it: we store no address and no way to reach anybody, so asking for a permission we could not act on was collecting a signature on a blank page.
That costs the project something real, and it is worth naming rather than tidying away. A retake a few weeks later is the only way to find out whether the experimental measure is stable enough to mean anything, and with no way to invite anybody back, that question stays open. It is listed as unanswerable on the evidence page for exactly this reason, rather than being filed under “needs more respondents”, which it is not.
3.The sensitive blocks
Two optional sections carry their own consent, asked at the point they appear rather than bundled in at the start: self-reported neurodivergence or diagnosis, and a short block about your early social environment.
Both are special-category data under GDPR. Both are directly relevant to whether closeness-conditional trait expression has developmental origins, which is one of the things this project exists to find out. Both are skippable with one click, are never required to finish or to see your results, and have their own switch in the export pipeline independent of the dataset checkbox above.
4.Confirmed again at the end
When you finish, you are shown the same three checkboxes again with your earlier answers filled in, and told plainly what you have just done. This is deliberate. Consent given before seeing an instrument is consent to a description of it; consent given afterwards is consent to the thing itself.
You may change any of them at that point. Afterwards, send the link to your results to privacy@trovvy.com and we will act on it — including removing the record entirely. We cannot act on a request that does not carry the link, because without it we have no way to tell which answers are yours.
5.If you stop partway
Your answers so far are kept and marked incomplete, under whatever consent you gave at the start.
We say so explicitly because it would be easy not to. Partial responses are real data from real people, dropout is the majority outcome for any long instrument, and where people stop is itself one of the more honest things this project can measure. An incomplete session is never scored — a partial score would be exactly the silent half-answer this instrument refuses everywhere else — and you can return with your code and finish it.
Related: privacy · terms · what gets released