Data Rights & Consent

The languages of Sudan belong to their communities — and so does the data that represents them. We operate on the WAXAL principle: the community retains ownership. We are stewards, not owners.

Before you contribute voice or language data, we tell you in plain language: what we collect, and how attribution and withdrawal work. You may contribute by voice — no literacy required — and consent is given knowingly and freely. You can decline any task.

You (and your language community) retain ownership of the knowledge and recordings you contribute. Your grant to us is a licence to steward and validate for the benefit of the community and the global research field — not a transfer of ownership.

To build language datasets and research that advance AI for Sudanese and African languages. Published corpora represent the *language*; they are not designed to identify you.

You can withdraw your consent and request deletion of your contributions at any time via data@birtallab.org. We will remove your data from our active systems and exclude it from future dataset releases.

We will be honest about one limit: once a dataset has been published openly, copies already downloaded by others cannot be recalled. We will not include withdrawn contributions in any new release.

We respect contributors’ time. We reject exploitative "gig" practices; contribution is voluntary and you may stop at any time.

We align our safety and governance with the spirit of the African Declaration on Internet Rights and Freedoms (AfDec). We will not knowingly enable surveillance, discrimination, or culturally harmful uses of this data. Our Constitutional AI safety is grounded in African contexts, not imported norms.

Please avoid sharing personal identifiers in recordings unless they are part of the language sample and you consent to their open publication. Where feasible, we minimise and remove direct identifiers before publication.

To access, correct, export, delete, or withdraw — contact data@birtallab.org. We aim to respond within 30 days.

Birtal Lab, Kampala, Uganda — data@birtallab.org. Questions about governance and ownership are welcome; transparency is part of the mission.