Privacy
Your privacy is important to us. SSRS adheres to industry standard guidelines set forth by the Insights Association and the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
SSRS Privacy Statement
Each APPC panel — The Annenberg Democracy Study Panel, The Annenberg Science and Health Panel, and National Annenberg Survey of Youth (NASY) — is a public opinion panel which is managed by SSRS. We are committed to maintaining your privacy in all aspects of our business. This privacy policy applies to each of these three panels, owned by APPC and operated by SSRS. This privacy policy describes how SSRS collects and uses the personal information you provide through these APPC panels. It also describes the choices available to you regarding our use of your personal information and how you can access and update this information.
SSRS, a survey research company, used industry guidelines and standards, and local, national, and international laws and requirements to develop this privacy policy. We appreciate the trust you have put in APPC and SSRS by joining an APPC Panel.
If SSRS decides to change any of its privacy policies, the changes will be posted here in this area so that you will always know the information we gather, how we might use that information and to whom we will disclose it. If we make any material changes, we will notify you by email (sent to the e-mail address specified in your account) or phone, or by means of a notice on this site prior to the change becoming effective.
How are your opinions used?
In any results we publish, respondents are reported together in groups. We do not individually identify respondents in any results presented. We work to ensure that your responses remain confidential.
What personal information is collected from you?
We collected personal information during the recruitment survey so that we can contact you for future surveys. The information we gather may include your name, email address, telephone number, and home address. In addition, we ask for demographic information so that we can analyze survey responses by demographic groups. The demographic information includes information such as your age, race, education, and gender.
How do we use your personal information?
We are committed to protecting your personal information. We use your personal information to communicate with you about upcoming surveys and to send you gift cards after you complete individual surveys. With your consent, we may purchase publicly available consumer and voting data from third parties and add it to our panelist database. This third-party data will not identify you by name or address within the APPC Panel database.
We will share your personal information with third parties only in the ways that are described in this privacy policy. We do not sell your personal information to third parties. We do not share any of your personal information without your permission.
We send your survey via an email link. In addition, enrolled panelists without internet access can participate in surveys by telephone.
We will disclose your personally identifiable information only if required by law such as to comply with a subpoena or similar legal process and when we believe that disclosure is necessary for safety, to protect our rights and/or comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or respond to a government request.
In addition, we may use your mailing address to send you compensation for completing our surveys. This may require that we share specific information with SSRS service partners to complete these services. We may use a third-party vendor to send you an email. In these cases, the third party will agree to SSRS privacy regulations prior to receiving any of your personal information. We contract with all SSRS partners to ensure they agree not to share or resell any of your personal information.
What tracking technologies do we use?
Technologies such as cookies, tags, and log files are used by SSRS and our service providers that perform services on behalf of SSRS for panel communications and compensation fulfillment. These technologies are used in analyzing trends, administering the site, tracking users’ movements around the site and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole. We may receive reports based on the use of these technologies by these companies on an individual as well as aggregated basis.
We use cookies solely for the purpose of tailoring web content to match your browser capability. Cookies may facilitate a user’s log-in, as navigation aids. The cookies do not store any of your personal information. SSRS does not link any information from cookies to any personal information while on our site. Users can control the use of cookies at the individual browser level. If you reject cookies, you may still use our site, but your ability to use some features or areas of our site may be limited.
Log files are files that automatically store information from a website you are visiting. The log files have information such as internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp, and clickstream data.
We may combine this automatically-collected log information with other information we collect about you.
SSRS and their email service provider embed HTML tags and link detectors in all email transmissions to help gauge the effectiveness of our email communications. These detectors track your capability of receiving HTML messages and the number of HTML messages opened. The detectors also track the links you click on within the email. The detectors do not collect any other information.
There are different ways you can prevent your online activity from being tracked. One of those is setting a preference in your browser that alerts websites you visit that you do not want them to collect certain information about you. This is referred to as a Do-Not-Track (“DNT”) signal.
Please note that our websites may not recognize or take action in response to DNT signals from web browsers. At this time, there is no universally-accepted standard for what a company should do when a DNT signal is detected. In the event a final standard is established, we will assess how to appropriately respond to these signals.
For more detailed information about cookies, Do-Not-Track and other tracking technologies, please visit allaboutcookies.org and allaboutdnt.com.
How do you make sure my personal information is safe?
The security of your personal information is important to us. SSRS maintains an appropriate level of technical, administrative, and physical safeguards to protect personal data and other information disclosed or collected by SSRS. All panel surveys will use secure communication protocol, or HTTPS. SSRS also reviews, monitors, and evaluates its privacy practices and protection systems on a regular basis. Despite the safeguards we implement, transmissions over the Internet and/or a mobile network are not totally secure and SSRS does not guarantee the security of online transmissions. SSRS is not responsible for any errors by individuals in submitting personal data to SSRS.
SSRS has a strong corporate policy which ensures only staff members involved in the operations of the panel have access to your personal information. This information is used solely for the purpose of conducting surveys with you and sending your compensation.
How can I change my contact information?
If you would like to change any of your contact information, you can send us any requests to [email protected]. We will respond to your request within 15 business days.
How old do you have to be to be included in the panel?
For the Annenberg Democracy Study Panel, we complete these surveys with U.S. citizens age 18 or older. We do not attempt to recruit anyone under the age of 18 in any of our recruitment processes. We do not contact anyone under the age of 18 without permission of their parent or guardian. We comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998.
For the Annenberg Science and Health Panel, we complete these surveys with U.S. adults age 18 or older. We do not attempt to recruit anyone under the age of 18 in any of our recruitment processes. We do not contact anyone under the age of 18 without permission of their parent or guardian. We comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998.
For the National Annenberg Survey of Youth (NASY), we complete these surveys with U.S. youth ages 13 to 22. To be enrolled in this panel, parental/legal guardian consent is obtained for each sampled teen ages 13 to 17. Assent is also obtained for each sampled teen ages 13 to 17. Parental/Legal guardian consent is not required for panel members ages 18 to 22. We comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998.
How can I be removed if I no longer want to be part of the panel?
All APPC Panel members are very important to APPC and SSRS and the quality of this research study. If you decide to deactivate your account or you no longer want to be a member of an APPC Panel, you can email us at [email protected]. Please put “UNSUBSCRIBE” in the subject line of your email.
After you unsubscribe from the panel, your panel membership will be terminated within 2 business days of receipt, and you will no longer be contacted to participate in this study. We will retain your contact information to facilitate payment of compensation for your completed panel surveys. The responses you provide in surveys will remain with APPC but will not contain any personal identifying information. We will only retain and use your information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements.
Complaints
We value the opinions of all APPC Panel members. If you have questions about our practices or your privacy, or wish to make a complaint, you can email us at [email protected]. If you would like to make such a statement via mail, our address is:
SSRS | 1 Braxton Way | Suite 125 | Glen Mills, PA 19342