SNG Privacy and Confidentiality Policy
At SNG, respecting privacy and confidentiality is an important part of our commitment to respondents, clients, and the general public.
(1) Notice
Any time anyone participates as a respondent in one of our assessments or surveys, whether in person or by telephone, mail or Internet, they can be assured that their individual responses will be kept confidential and never linked to their individual identifying information without their express permission. Personal identifying information will never be sold or rented to anyone.
You are free to choose whether or not to participate in a survey, free to choose not to answer any specific questions and free to discontinue participation at any time.
(2) Purpose
We inform individuals why we are collecting their data.
We do not transmit to or share with third parties contact information or data we have collected. We protect the privacy and confidentiality of all respondents and protect any information that would allow the third party to identify these individuals. When we collect data on behalf of our clients, we strip the results of any personal identity information and transmit information to our clients in the aggregate.
(3) Consent
When we collect data from individuals, organizations, or businesses, we inform them explicitly that we are doing so and ask for their consent.
If we use a third party to collect data for us (e.g. telephone interviews), we disclose the fact that we have engaged them to do so.
(4) Security
We take precautions to protect the data we collect from individuals and we have security measures in place to protect against the loss and misuse of information under our control.
We have written agreements with our clients which require them to:
- use our data products only for public policy research, planning, and educational purposes;
- treat this information confidentially (note: this information does not contain data that would allow our clients to identify individuals).
- protect our data products from unauthorized physical and electronic access;
- comply with all relevant regulations protecting the privacy of individuals.
(5) Opt-out from our mailing list
Individuals can opt out at any time from our mailing list. They can change (or ask to have deleted) the information they provided us.
(6) Taking surveys and gathering information
When we engage the services of a company to conduct telephone surveys and gather data for our research, we require the company to comply with the terms of SNG’s privacy policy.