Privacy Protection in the Online Survey

Online surveys are restricted by research ethics and laws. In many countries, violating privacy laws involves the risk of severe penalties. SoSci Survey supports you in creating privacy compliant online surveys. First, SoSci Survey provides features to collect data without violating privacy. Second, the survey servers www.soscisurvey.de and s2survey.net provide the infrastructure to run privacy-compliant online studies according to GDPR. This particularly includes customer and employee surveys.

If your study works with personal data, it may be necessary to make a contract about the processing of personal data with us. Our DPA (data processing agreement) conforms to the strict German and European privacy laws (GDPR, BDSG n.V.). For details see Personal Data.

• Companies have the ability to save Internet usage detail records about its employees, which ultimately allows them to match certain IP addresses and questionnaires, using timestamps, for example. Such data usually already comes with certain rules that regulate its usage.
• If your questionnaire asks for personal information, such as names, email addresses and phone numbers, the questionnaire obviously loses its anonymity.
• To prevent third parties to access this data, you should choose a password that is absolutely safe. Please avoid words which already exist and vary the use of capital and small initial letters. Including numbers and choosing a password of at least 7 characters makes it even more safe.
• While running an online survey it is necessary for the server to be connected to the Internet. Storing the data on a “machine not connected to the Internet” is impossible by design.

Particularly companies need little work to extrapolate from an IP address to the corresponding person. SoSci Survey will therefore not record IP addresses by default.

The value of IP addresses is mostly negligible, you can usually relinquish it. Should you require the IP address in the data set, please employ a question of type Device and Transmitted Variables.

If you are conducting studies with a known set of participants or panel studies where participants are to be repeatedly interviewed, SoSci Survey provides a project-internal participant administration. All data records of the same participant will get a unique ID (SERIAL, person ID). This ID does not allow any conclusion about the email address and thus the identity of the participant.

However, on conducting panel studies that requires participants to be interviewed repeatedly, SoSci Survey will store the assignment between email address and person ID in a different database so that users can receive an individual link. Upon deleting the email addresses, this assignment will be deleted as well (Send Mailings).

You might want to collect email or postal addresses to provide incentives like a raffle or study outcomes. SoSci Survey offers the functionality to store email addresses in a different database with no possibility to consolidate the address with the original questionnaire dataset. In this case, the participant's questionnaire details will remain anonymous (Collect Contact Data Separately).

If collecting very sensitive data, recording of timestamps may be disabled in the project settings. In this case, neither the interview's starting time, nor dwell times will be stored.

This measure further decreases the probability that collected data is de-anonymized by merging with external data (e.g., an Internet provider's connection data).

Please note, that timestamps may still be reconstructed from the server logfiles. If the recording of log files is to be switched off for particularly sensitive surveys (e.g., in the area of crime research), this is possible, but involves additional costs due to the effort involved.

Project managers have the ability to delete collected data as well as the entire survey at any time. Even manual filing and archiving of the survey within the user account is possible. By default, any project will be filed if the project manager doesn't log in within 3 months. If this happens, all data of the survey project will be deleted and the questionnaire will be archived as XML file – in case the user wants go back to it at a later point.

Unrelated to these deletions are backups - we save them on our server on a daily basis to guarantee a stable operation of the server. This way data loss or accidental deletions caused by technical malfunctions can be repaired. These backups are saved for a time period of 1 year (www.soscisurvey.de) or 1 month (s2survey.net), respectively, and are deleted afterwards. We don't use any of this data, except for the purpose of recovery. Please note that the recovery of lost data caused by the project manager, such as accidental deletion, is tied to a surcharge of 60 euros.

Can the project management delete individual cases from the data set during the data collection if the data subjects request this?

• If the data is personal, you can find out which case (CASE) belongs to a person.
• If you use the privacy mode “pseudonymous” in the list of contacts, the DPA stipulates that the server operator may, if necessary, establish the link between the address entry and the case in the data set, or delete the case.
• Via Collected Data → Delete Collected Data, you can delete individual cases from the data set.

Tip: Under Compose Questionnaire, in the Settings tab, activate the option “Show button to cancel the interview and delete the record”. This allows participants to delete their case without your intervention.

The server for SoSciSurvey.de is located in Europe, in Germany since 2011. The data centers used are certified according to ISO 27001, which ensures, among other things, organizational, structural, technical and supply security according to common standards.

The server runs Linux operating systems together with the open source web server NGINX. Regular security updates and the systematic review of the source code minimize the risk of security holes. Access to the server always takes place via encrypted connections.

To ensure the safety of the data, the projects and the collected data are backed up daily.

SoSci Survey itself, of course, does not pass on the collected data to third parties. The contracts with the hosting providers ensure that other persons do not have access to the data.

Unencrypted data transfer theoretically allows for third parties to gain access to the transmitted information.

The servers www.soscisurvey.de and s2survey.net therefore use SSL/TLS encryption with a validated certificate, noticeable from the https:// preceding the URL. All data is being encrypted by the browser and decoded by the server. This process is considered very secure.

Upon opening a webpage, a browser usually submits other data along with the IP-address. Information like browser-ID, operating system or language settings is saved into a logfile, along with the type of request (usually the url) and a timestamp.

The servers www.soscisurvey.de and s2survey.net are configured not to store IP addresses in the access logfiles. Therefore, even a combination of timestamps and server logfiles does not allow a reconstruction of IP addresses.

A survey project usually stores the questionnaire access time and the time for completing a questionnaire, into the dataset. Other information is not stored unless activated in the project settings.

On visiting a website, the server can provide a data fragment to the browser (usually an unique user ID), called cookie. Upon visiting the website again, the browser will submit the cookie and the server can identify a specific user. SoSci Survey uses cookies to check on a page reload if survey project admins are logged in.

By default, the questionnaires do not use any cookies. Instead, to identify a user on filling out a questionnaire, the user ID is not being stored permanently on a user's computer but transferred from one questionnaire page to the next.

Cookies do not serve as reliable means to prevent multiple questionnaire submissions. The only way to avoid those is by using personalized questionnaire links, which SoSci Survey provides by the mailing or access code features (Send Mailings).