Refusal lab
Use this card in lesson 05. Print one per small group. It works best with at least one person who has built software, and at least one person from the community whose data is at stake.
Request cards
Pick one. They are made up for practice, so change the details to fit your own place.
- Exact locations. A university asks for the GPS points of a rare orchid "only to validate our model".
- A ceremony. A media team wants a ceremony translated and summarised for a public demo of an AI tool.
- Forest recordings. A company offers free species detection if the community uploads all its AudioMoth recordings, including the ones near the village.
- ID documents. An accountant wants an AI service to read participants' ID cards and signatures to speed up payments.
- An oral history archive. A foundation wants to train a chatbot on recorded stories because the answers "would be educational".
1. The request
| Field | Answer |
|---|---|
| Who is asking | |
| Stated purpose | |
| Which data | |
| What output they want | |
| Where it would be processed | |
| What the community already decided | |
| How long it would be kept |
2. Three rules
Write them in plain language or pseudocode. Each ends in one of four outcomes: DENY, REDACT, KEEP LOCAL or ASK THE COUNCIL.
| Rule | If... | Then |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||
| 2 | ||
| 3 |
Example: IF data = rare_species_location AND council_decision = keep_close THEN DENY
3. The reply
- Reason code: for example
NOT_APPROVED_USE,RESTRICTED_DATA,NO_EXPORT. - What the requester sees: one sentence.
- What the reply must not reveal: anything about the thing being protected.
- Who can reopen it: nobody, the council, or a named process.
- What gets logged: the request, the rule and the date. Never the protected data itself.
4. Try to break it
| Workaround | Did it get through? | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| "We will anonymise it." | ||
| "We only need the totals." | ||
| "This is a partnership." | ||
| "Could the AI work it out indirectly?" |
Finish this sentence
Our system accepts no when . It fails when .
A refusal belongs in the defaults, the replies, the logs and the stopping points of a system, so nobody has to keep repeating it.
Data is Soil · GainForest · www.datasoil.org/handouts/three-ask-refusal