docs/LICENSE_PRIVACY_CONSENT.md

Licensing, privacy, and consent gate

This gate runs before preprocessing. Passing technical validation does not satisfy it.

Licensing review

• Identify the actual rights holder or authorised publisher.
• Save the exact licence text or canonical licence URL and reviewed version.
• Separate access permission, copying, transformation, training, redistribution, and commercial-use permissions; they are not interchangeable.
• Record attribution, notice, share-alike, field-of-use, and deletion obligations.
• Check whether dataset terms conflict with licences embedded in individual records.
• Treat missing, custom, ambiguous, or conflicting terms as pending or rejected.

Privacy and sensitive-data review

• Determine whether records contain direct or indirect personal identifiers.
• Assess sensitive categories, vulnerable populations, private communications, and location data.
• Document collection context, reasonable expectations, retention, access controls, and deletion.
• Use data minimisation: retain only what is necessary for the approved research purpose.
• Test redaction and removal procedures, but do not treat automated detection as complete.
• Keep raw review material out of public repositories and logs.

Consent and lawful basis

Consent must be specific enough for the intended use, recorded, revocable where applicable, and separable from mere public visibility. If another lawful basis is proposed, record the jurisdiction, scope, reasoning, reviewer, and any required impact assessment. Legal uncertainty remains a stop condition for publication.

Approval rule

A manifest may move to approved only when:

• all sources have permission_status: approved;
• privacy review is passed;
• consent or another documented lawful basis is non-empty;
• redistribution is explicitly allowed or the outputs are configured not to redistribute source content;
• a named reviewer and UTC approval timestamp are present;
• unresolved notes contain no release-blocking issue.

The reference validator checks that these fields exist. It cannot determine whether the legal or ethical judgment is correct.