Privacy Policy
Your privacy is important to us
Market research serves an important function within businesses. Businesses can make better decisions through survey research. As a survey participant, your opinions help companies better understand customer needs and circumstances, develop new products, make existing ones better, and improve customer service.
When you participate in research conducted by Vanson Bourne, you can be assured that we will protect your privacy. Occasionally, we may re-contact you to validate your responses. We will never misrepresent ourselves or what we are doing.
We have developed rigorous privacy standards that are set out in our privacy policy below. Several members of our company’s professional staff belong to the Market Research Society, the world's leading research association. The following points summarise our privacy policy:
- We promise to protect your privacy and treat the information you give us as confidential.
- The information you provide will be used only for research purposes.
- We will not release your personal information to any third party without your consent.
- We will never try to sell you anything and we will never sell your personal data to anyone. That is not our business. We are not telemarketers or direct marketers. We are market researchers interested only in your opinions.
- Your decisions about participating in a study, responding to specific questions, or discontinuing participation will be respected without question.
- We will retain your contact details while you are a member of the Vanson Bourne Community. Your completed survey responses are stored anonymously in a separate database.
- Anonymous survey responses can only be linked to a member’s personal data via a unique ID within the panel database.
- If you have any privacy questions or concerns, please contact us using the ‘Contact Us’ page of our website.
The information that we collect
When our company conducts online or qualitative research, our invitations and questionnaires clearly identify us and explain the purpose(s) of our contact.
When we contact you, we generally do so for one of the following purposes:
- To invite you to participate in research;
- To validate answers you gave in a recent survey we conducted;
- To update and to ensure that our records of your personal information are correct.
Occasionally, we may contact you for one of these other purposes:
- To share survey results and Vanson Bourne Community news with you;
- To ask for your permission to use your personal information for a purpose that was not explained to you when we first collected your personal information.
When you participate in our research, we may ask you for your personal opinions, as well as demographic information. You may refuse to answer certain questions or discontinue participation in a study at any time. If you join our community, you may rescind your membership at any time by following the unsubscribe instructions that we include in every e-mail that we send. When you participate in our research in the form of online surveys, we collect fingerprint information from the device used in order to reduce fraudulent activity within our surveys.
| Type of Data Held | Length of Time Held | How Data is Held | |
| Vanson Bourne Community Respondents |
|
We will retain information about you while you are a member of the Vanson Bourne Community Device fingerprint information may be retained for up to 5 years from survey completion to assist with fraud prevention |
Data is stored on servers based within the EEA Device fingerprint information is stored on servers in the US, the international transfer of data is protected with GDPR standard contractual clauses. Please see the privacy notice: https://www.imperium.com/privacy/ |
Details of our processing
Confidentiality of survey responses and contact information
We combine your survey responses in a given survey with the responses of all others who participate and report those combined responses to the client that commissioned the study. We will never intentionally report your individual survey responses, except as described below.
Your survey responses may be collected, stored or processed by our affiliated companies or non-affiliated service providers, both within and outside the UK. They are contractually bound to keep any information they collect and disclose to us, or we collect and disclose to them confidential and must protect it with security standards and practices that are equivalent to our own.
In addition to keeping your survey responses confidential, we will never sell, share, rent or otherwise intentionally transfer your name, address, telephone number or e-mail address to our clients, other market research companies, direct marketing companies or anyone else.
The only exceptions when we may disclose your personal information or survey responses to third parties are as follows:
- You request or consent to sharing your identifying information and individual responses with the third parties for a specified purpose;
- In accordance with the ESOMAR guidelines, we provide your responses to a third party who is contractually bound to keep the information disclosed confidential and use it only for research or statistical purposes;
- In the rare but possible circumstance that the information is subject to disclosure pursuant to judicial or other government subpoenas, warrants, orders or for similar legal or regulatory requirements.
How to contact us
Questions regarding this policy, complaints about our practices and access requests should be sent through the ‘Contact Us’ page of our website, in writing to Vanson Bourne, The Courtyard, 2 London Road, Newbury, Berkshire, RG14 1AX, or via telephone on 01635 550449.
We will investigate all complaints and attempt to resolve those that we find are justified. If necessary, we will amend our policies and procedures to ensure that other individuals do not experience the same problem.
Last revised 18.01.2022