Survey Privacy Notice

Survey Participant Notice and Consent

Our surveys aim to gather insights, perspectives, experiences, and other critical data about our community. This Notice applies to all people who complete our surveys, including current panel participants and individuals who are not panelists when they take a survey (each, a "Survey Participant"). Participation is voluntary. Your responses to survey questions, along with demographic, eligibility, contact, and other information you choose to provide, including categories that may be considered sensitive data under certain privacy laws such as sexual orientation, gender identity, and health information ("Survey 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 de-identified manner, and none of your personal identifying information will ever be shared with external partners.

Survey 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.
• Survey administration and panel-related information: for example, eligibility information, survey invitation or completion information, consent choices, and, where you choose to provide it, contact information used to administer surveys, follow up with you, or invite you to join or participate in our panel.

For current panelists, we may associate Survey Response Data with your panel profile to administer the panel, support research and analytics, and avoid asking you repeatedly for the same information. If you are not a panelist, we may use information you provide to administer the survey and, if you choose to join the panel or ask to be contacted about future research opportunities, to create or maintain a panel profile and send future survey invitations.

Participating in a survey is voluntary. You may leave the survey at any time or decline to provide a response to specific questions.

In most cases, our external partners receive Survey Response Data in a de-identified aggregate summary. Where the external partner specifically requires response-level reporting, our external partners may receive Survey 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 Survey Participants or re-identify Survey Response Data and are required to promptly notify us of any known or suspected breach of this obligation.

Protecting the identity of Survey Participants is of the utmost importance to us. We maintain all Survey Response Data received in a secure environment, protected by administrative and technical safeguards, and only maintain Survey Response Data for as long as necessary to fulfill the research, analytics, survey administration, and panel administration 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 applicable privacy policy, though such withdrawal will not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent prior to its withdrawal.

Once Survey 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 regarding the data we retain directly by contacting us at research@hrc.org.

By starting or completing any survey, you acknowledge and expressly consent to our collection, use, storage, and disclosure of your Survey Response Data, including sensitive demographic, belief, experience, and health-related information that you choose to provide, for research, analytics, survey administration, panel administration, 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. If you choose to provide contact information to join or be considered for our panel, you consent to our use of that information for panel recruitment, panel administration, and future research invitations.