Privacy Statement

We take the utmost care in protecting your privacy and the information you provide whilst research is taking place or to enable us to make contact with you and provide incentive payments to you.

As part of that care, we are committed to meeting the requirements of the following laws and codes:

• The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

• Data Protection Act 1998 and the new Data Protection Act which will enact GDPR requirements

We conduct market research, it is not our objective to promote or sell products to respondents.  Your responses will be treated as confidential unless we are required to divulge them (as can be the case with healthcare research, where adverse event reporting is a requirement); if this does apply you will be informed before an interview takes place.

Taking Part in Research

We will not mislead you about the nature of the research or how the data will be used. If you are invited to take part in research, it will be because:

• You were selected because you hold a product with, have made a recent purchase from, or have visited one of the companies for whom we work

• You have given permission for a company to supply your details to a third party for research purposes

• You have been contacted by an associate company who find respondents on our behalf and have given your consent to be contacted by us.

In the event that you were contacted by us and do not believe you have given such permission, or if you would prefer that we didn’t contact you, let us know and we will delete any contact details that we hold and notify the organisation that supplied us with your details.

It is not our intention to invite children under the age of 16 to participate in research studies without taking measures to ensure appropriate consent from a responsible adult.

Information Collected

When we contact you, we generally do so to conduct research with you.

The information we collect can contain your personal opinions as well as personal information such as name, address, postcode, gender, occupation, age, email address, telephone number etc.  We will only ever collect information that is relevant to the topic that we are researching.

We may invite you to view information over a computer browser during a research interview (e.g. Screenleap), or through a Skpe screen share or similar software.  This will enable you to view information that we broadcast, but we will never seek or have access to information from your computer.

Personally identifiable information collected will be kept for no longer than one month from project commencement unless stated specifically at the time of taking part. Non identifiable information you give will be kept for no longer than 2 years.

Use of Information

The personal information we collect is combined with the responses from other participants before being reported back to a client.  Considerable care will be taken to ensure each respondent’s anonymity such that there is no way that clients can know which people have taken part in a research study.

Information would only be disclosed if required by a legal or regulatory entity: we regard this as an extremely unlikely occurrence.

Sharing Information

We will not share any of your personal information with third parties.

We will endeavour to ensure that your personal information is kept confidential and secure.

Security

We maintain appropriate technical, administrative and physical safeguards to protect information, including, without limitation, personally identifiable information, received or collected by us.

Access

Participating in any research we do is voluntary.  You can withdraw from it at any time.  Please email philg@shiftconsultancy.co.uk to inform us if this is the case.

You are entitled to access the personal information we hold about you (called a subject access request) and you have the right to update any incorrect information we hold.

Questions

If you have any questions about this policy, please contact us at the email address shown above. 

This policy may be updated in the future to reflect best practice and any changes in our requirements if legislation changes.

Sept 11, 2018