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.
How we collect data
We use third-party 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 two unique alphanumeric identifiers: a panel ID (generated by the panel provider) and a GWI ID (generated by GWI). These identifiers allow us to distinguish one respondent's answers from another's, and to ask the panel provider to issue a recontact survey or track trends. Crucially, GWI never collects respondents' names, email addresses, or contact details, and we never ask panel providers to supply them.
How anonymization works
For our platform services, GWI anonymizes all survey responses before they're made available to clients. The data delivered to clients through the platform never includes an identifier and is aggregated at a level such that there can be no re-identification. For example, insights such as "X% of dog owners have a higher-than-average interest in the environment" mean that even when combined with other data sets, respondents cannot be identified.
GWI’s approach
By adopting this approach, not only are we able to ensure compliance with 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 with great insights, without privacy risk.
Here are a few more examples of how we work to ensure the quality of our data:
GWI approach - collection
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.
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 anonymized) 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.
GWI approach - platform
All of the data in our platform is fully anonymized and complies with market research industry standards applicable to the relevant topics.
For use of the platform, our full privacy policy is available on our website. Note that this page also includes our cookie policy.