Privacy Policy

Arq Foundation ("Arq", "we", "us") is a policy research organisation based in Brussels. We work on AI infrastructure, metascience, and improving statecraft for and with AI.

For any questions about how we handle your personal data, contact us at info@arq.foundation.

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Arq maintains a contact database to manage its professional relationships with policymakers, researchers, funders, and other stakeholders. This section explains how we handle that data.

What we store

We may hold the following information about professional contacts:

• Your name
• Professional email address
• Organisation and role
• LinkedIn or Twitter/X profile URL (if publicly available)
• A record of our professional interactions: dates, topics discussed, and follow-up actions
• Internal notes on professional context relevant to our work

We do not collect or store sensitive personal data, such as health, political opinions, religion, ethnicity, or similar categories.

Why we process this data

We use this data to:

• Coordinate our policy engagement and follow up on meetings
• Maintain institutional memory across our team
• Track relevant contacts for workshops, consultations, and collaborative projects

We do not use your data for marketing, automated decision-making, or profiling. We do not sell or share your data with third parties for their own purposes.

Legal basis

We process professional contact data under legitimate interest (GDPR Article 6(1)(f)). As a policy research organisation, we have a legitimate interest in maintaining records of our professional network to carry out our mission. We have conducted a Legitimate Interest Assessment confirming that this interest is not overridden by your rights and freedoms.

How we obtain your data

We collect contact information through direct professional interaction:

• Meetings, calls, or email exchanges
• Conferences and events
• Professional introductions or referrals
• Publicly available professional information, such as institutional staff pages

We do not purchase contact lists or use automated data scraping.

How long we keep it

We review our contact database annually. Contacts with no recorded interaction in the past 18 months and no continuing professional relevance are deleted. We may retain a record for longer if the contact remains relevant to an active or planned project.

Where your data is stored

Our contact database is hosted on Notion (Notion Labs, Inc., USA). This transfer is covered by the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and Standard Contractual Clauses as approved by the European Commission.

Under the GDPR, you have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you
• Rectify any inaccurate information
• Erase your data ("right to be forgotten")
• Restrict processing of your data
• Object to processing based on legitimate interest
• Lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at info@arq.foundation. We will respond within 30 days.

You may also lodge a complaint with the Belgian Data Protection Authority: Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit / Autorité de protection des données, Rue de la Presse 35, 1000 Brussels, www.dataprotectionauthority.be.

We may update this policy from time to time. The "last updated" date at the top of this page reflects the most recent version.