Privacy Notice

Panelist Privacy Notice and Consent

Our surveys aim to gather insights, perspectives, experiences, and other critical data about our community. Participation is voluntary and your responses to the survey questions, along with demographic and other data, including categories that may be considered sensitive data under certain privacy laws such as sexual orientation, gender identity, and health information (“Panelist Response Data”), may be used or shared with external partners engaged in community or diversity research. Your personal information and survey responses will only be shared with external partners in aggregate and/or a deidentified manner and none of your personal identifying information will ever be shared with external partners.

Panelist Response Data may include:

• Demographic data: for example, geographic region, age group, race, ethnicity, marital status, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, and medical condition or status (e.g., general health status relevant to community research; provision of any health information is entirely voluntary).
• Interests, beliefs, and experiences: for example, your hobbies or activities, shopping or entertainment preferences, historical or cultural interests, philosophical beliefs, social or political views, and experiences, interactions, or habits. 

Participating in a panel survey is voluntary; you may leave the survey at any time or decline providing a response to specific questions. See the survey privacy notice for more information.

In most cases, our external partners receive Panelist Response Data in a de-identified aggregate summary. Where the external partner specifically requires response-level reporting, our external partners may receive Panelist Response Data as reports that include individual responses to the questions posed; however, the report does not include your name, contact information, or other direct or indirect identifiers that could reasonably be used to identify you. All external partners are contractually prohibited from attempting to identify Panel Participants or re-identify Panelist Response Data and are required to promptly notify us of any known or suspected breach of this obligation.

Protecting our Panelists’ identities is of the utmost importance to us. We maintain all Panelist Response Data received in a secure environment, protected by administrative and technical safeguards, and retain it only for as long as necessary to fulfill the research and analytics purposes described in this Notice, after which it will be deleted or anonymized in a manner that renders the data de-identified. You may withdraw your consent for future data collection at any time by contacting us as described in our Panelist Privacy Policy, though withdrawal will not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal. 

Once Panelist Response Data is disclosed to our external partners in de-identified or anonymized form, it may not be subject to consumer access, correction, or deletion requests directed to those external partners, as the information disclosed cannot reasonably be linked back to you. You may still exercise your privacy rights as a Panel Participant regarding the data we retain directly by contacting us at research@hrc.org. 

By participating in the panel and completing any survey, you acknowledge and expressly consent to our collection, use, storage, and disclosure of your Panelist Response Data, including sensitive demographic, belief, experience, and health-related information that you choose to provide, for research, analytics, and publication of community insights consistent with this Notice.

You further understand and agree that such information may be disclosed to our external partners in de-identified form, either as individual response-level reports (from which direct and indirect identifiers have been removed) or in aggregate summary form.