Privacy Policy

Last Updated and Effective: 26 September 2013

This Privacy Policy explains our ethical commitments, data management practices, and all other measures that we employ to protect your privacy and personal data. We have written this Privacy Policy in plain language, to explain what information we collect, how we collect it, how we use it, how you can control our disclosure of it, and the security measures we employ to protect your information.

Before using Survey Graph, please read our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use, and only use Survey Graph if you are in agreement with these two documents.

Survey Graph is a tool that our members use to engage their stakeholders. Consequently, we have divided our Privacy Policy into these three sections:

Section-A: For informants who complete surveys and provide feedback to our members
Section-B: For members who use Survey Graph to collect feedback
Section-C: For all people who use Survey Graph
A. Informants who provide feedback
This section is for individual informants who provide feedback to members through Survey Graph.

What information we store
Our member organizations, whom you provide feedback to, use our system to store your name, email address, and organizational affiliation. When you provide feedback, we store you response data. As a common practice, we use log files, JavaScript tags, and email response data to capture anonymous aggregate usage trends, to improve our services. As a security measure, we also record users’ IP address, client details, and website usage behaviour that could indicate hacking or security threats.

How we use your information
Survey Graph is a tool used by our members to collect anonymous feedback from their stakeholders. Our members control which stakeholders are invited to provide feedback and which may be excluded. We will only contact you on behalf of our member organizations, and we will never share or sell your email address or personally identifying information. We use your feedback to produce reports for our members that contains aggregate statistics and performance metrics. Our reports also include open-ended qualitative responses. Your feedback, along with that of all other informants, is used for aggregate statistics about organizations and their sector. We use aggregate website and email usage statistics to improve our service.

How we protect your identity
We employ many measures to protect your personal identity, and ensure that your feedback is fully anonymous. For starters, Survey Graph acts as a barrier between you and the organization that you are commenting on. The organization that invited you to provide feedback will know that you are in their list of potential informants, because they placed you there. Additionally, to help member organizations maintain clean informant email lists, we will show them which email addresses are invalid, potentially invalid, or not in use. However, Survey Graph has been designed to prevent member organizations from associating particular informants with their feedback. To further protect your personal identity, all feedback is reported in an aggregated and anonymous format.

Protecting your own identity
We have taken many measures to protect your identity. However, we are unable to protect your identity if you reveal it yourself, intentionally or accidently. For this reason, our Terms of Use and Privacy Policies require you to protect your own identity when responding to open questions by not providing any personal information or other details that may reveal who you are or where you work.

Opting-in and opting-out
Your participation with Survey Graph is voluntary. You can opt-out any time. Every communication that we send to you will provide a link to our opt-in or out page. On this page, there are two ways you can opt-out. The first way is to opt-out of communications from our member organization that invited you to provide feedback. The second way is for you to opt-out of all communications from all members who use our service. If you select the second way of opting-out, none of our members will be able to contact you through our service. After you opt-out, we will send you an email verifying that you have been opted-out and provide instructions on how to opt-back in, should a third party have opted-you out without your consent, or should you wish to participate at a later date. When you opt-out, we retain your email address in our database in order to prevent or limit our members from contacting you in the future. At any point, you can opt-in.

B. Members who receive feedback
This section describes our Privacy Policy for Survey Graph members who receive feedback from informants.

Information we store
Survey Graph collects a range of data, including user profiles, organizational descriptions, informant feedback, email engagement statistics, and website usage statistics. As a security measure, to prevent potential abuses of our system, we also record IP address, client details and any website usage behaviour that could indicate hacking. We also require members to include an organization profile with contact information. Members have full control over their own profiles and are required to maintain correct and updated information, which is accessible by all their informants.

How we use your information
We use your organizational description to produce surveys. We use your public profile and any branding information to represent you within Survey Graph, and to provide a direct contact should any informants need to contact you. We use your stakeholder email addresses to gather feedback about your organization. Your informants’ feedback is used to produce periodic performance reports about your organization and contribute to aggregate feedback about your sector. As a standard practice, to improve our services, we use anonymous aggregate website usage data from log files and JavaScript tags.

How we protect your informants’ email addresses
Your informant list is the property of your organization. Survey Graph is one of many tools that you may use to engage these people, whether through email newsletters, personal emails, social media, or other communication tools. Survey Graph allows you to add, modify, or delete informants as you like. Taking the workload out of informant engagement, Survey Graph automatically contacts your informants on behalf of your organization. It does so with minimal contact, in a highly respectful manner, and only focuses on their participation. We will never contact your informants for any other purpose, nor will we include advertising or marketing messages in our engagement communications. Under no circumstances will we ever sell, share, or reveal your email address, unless we were legally required to, such as in the case of a subpoena, court order, or police enforcement. However, we will resist such requests to the maximum of our legal capacity and will provide you with notice of any such request, so that you may have an opportunity to respond. To further protect your participants, we follow industry standards for data protection and security.

Limiting your access to informant identities
To protect the identities of your informants, we have implemented several measures to prevent you from personally identifying the informants who are providing feedback about your organization. As you will have added their email addresses yourself, you already know who is on your list. Although we will never show you who has responded, we will show you which email addresses are invalid, potentially invalid, or unused, so that you may maintain a clean informant list.

Maintaining your public profile
Survey Graph is a transparent feedback tool for organizations and their stakeholders. Although we hide the identity of informants, all member organizations must maintain a public profile. Public profiles must include your organization’s name, mission, address, and contact details for inquiries about how your organization will use informants’ feedback. We also encourage you to brand your profile. The purpose of your public profile is to demonstrate to informants that your organization is using our system, to provide a direct feedback channel should they need to contact you, and so that we can contact you for matters related to using Survey Graph.

Closing your account
You may close your account at any time. However, as a standard disaster recovery practice, data may remain resident on offsite data backups until they are eventually destroyed.

C. All users
This section describes Privacy Policy principles that apply to all Survey Graph users.

How we secure and protect your information
To prevent unauthorised access, maintain data accuracy, and ensure the correct use of information, we maintain appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information and data stored on our system. While no computer system is completely secure, we believe the measures we have implemented reduce the likelihood of security problems to a level appropriate to the type of data involved.

We recognize that it is impossible to transfer data over the Internet with 100% security. We recognize that email is insecure and that there is always a small risk that information transmitted through the Internet can be interception by third parties. We have taken measures to protect data transfer, such as using secure and encrypted https. However, it is impossible to provide a guarantee that all information transmitted over the Internet is 100% secure. We use cookies for session control, to improve the security of Survey Graph, and to better protect our members and their informants’ data.

We host Survey Graph within the United States and we store backups within Canada. Consequently, our data is subject to privacy laws and jurisdiction of these countries.

Anonymous aggregate data
As a common practice, we use analytics tools to gather anonymous website usage and email response statistics in order to improve our services. We also build anonymous sector indexes from responses to organization that have elected to use our benchmarking services. We may use, publish, or share this information with third-parties, which contains information such as how many visitors were on our site, which pages were most popular, or how different sectors are performing. This data contains no personally identifiable information.

Correcting errors
All users have a right to correct any inaccuracies. Informants, who believe their information is incorrect, should contact the member organizations that invited them to provide feedback. Member organizations can correct any inaccuracies directly in the system. If any user feels there is incorrect information that they are unable to correct, they can contact privacy@Survey Graph.com and we will respond within 2-3 business days.

Changes to our Privacy Policy
We reserve the right to change this Privacy Policy from time to time and if we do so, we will notify our members through our email newsletter. If at some point in the future, there is a change to our Privacy Policy, unless we obtain your express consent, such change will only apply to information collected after the revised Privacy Policy took effect.

More information on this Privacy Policy
Survey Graph is owned and operated by AlterSpark Consulting (www.alterspark.com). If you have any questions, concerns or suggestions regarding this Privacy Policy please contact us at: privacy@alterspark.com.