At GWI, we believe that companies can get meaningful insights without using personal data. That’s why our platform contains only anonymised and aggregated data.
We’re able to do this because we use panel providers to issue our surveys. The panel provider controls their own relationship with the respondent and holds their identifiable information. When the respondent completes our survey, GWI receives the responses attached to a unique respondent ID.
We can use the unique ID to ask the panel provider to issue a recontact survey or to track trends. BUT, we can't use the responses or IDs to identify who the respondent is.
By adopting this approach, not only are we able to ensure compliance with various privacy laws, as well as the codes of conduct laid out by the MRS and ESOMAR, and the IAB Transparency & Consent Framework. But we are also able to provide customers great insights, without privacy risk.
Here are a few more examples of how we work to ensure the quality of our data:
We source our respondents from reputable panel providers, who themselves are privacy compliant and share our values regarding respect and openness.
We have a dedicated in-house privacy team who work closely with teams across GWI to ensure that all of our processes are compliant and up to date.
At the start of our surveys, we have a link to our survey privacy policy, which goes into comprehensive detail about how we handle data.
All of the data in our platform is fully anonymized.
Within our surveys, some questions cover areas deemed ‘special category data’ under privacy law. We don’t ask all of these questions in all markets, but they relate to personal health, race/ethnicity/nationality, political views and sexual orientation. We always ask for consent to collect and process special category data, (despite this being anonymised) and always give the respondent a ‘Prefer Not To Say’ option within such questions.
For GWI Kids, we obtain parental consent for them to complete our surveys.
Although we process anonymised data, we nonetheless hold ourselves to the standard of a data controller, to ensure that we are being transparent about how we collect data and keep it safe.
Our full privacy policy is available on our website here. Note that this page also includes our cookie policy.