Privacy notice for research participants
How we handle your information when you take one of our studies.
Who is collecting this
MethodFrame runs these studies. We decide what is collected and why, which makes us the controller of the information described here. If you reached the study through a panel such as Prolific, that company has its own separate privacy notice covering its own handling of your data.
Your answers are not anonymous to us
When you take a study through a panel, your answers are stored together with the participant ID that panel gave you. We need that link to pay you and to check data quality. It means we can connect your answers back to your panel account, so those answers are pseudonymous rather than anonymous.
What we collect
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Your answers to the study questions | The research itself |
| Your panel participant ID | To pay you, and to spot duplicate submissions |
| How long each screen takes you | To identify rushed or inattentive responses |
| Typing and pasting patterns — how much and how fast, never the words you type outside the answer boxes | To identify automated or copy-pasted responses |
| Your browser, device type, screen size, language and time zone | To check the study displayed properly and to describe the sample |
What we do not collect: your name, your email address, your IP address, your location, and any audio, video or photographs. We do not use cookies to track you across other websites, and we do not run advertising trackers on these pages.
How it is used, and who sees it
Your answers are used for our own research into automated methods for summarizing survey responses. We do not sell your data. We do not share it with third parties for marketing. Anything we publish or show to a client is aggregated or de-identified — never a record that can be traced back to you.
How long we keep it
- The link between your participant ID and your answers is deleted within 30 days of the study closing, once payment is settled.
- After that we keep only the de-identified answers and quality measurements.
- Encrypted backups age out on a rolling basis and are not kept indefinitely.
Your rights
You can ask us what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask us to delete it. Where the law gives you the right to object to processing or to receive a copy of your data, you can exercise that too. Because the identifying link is removed within 30 days, requests are easiest to action while the study is recent — quote your panel participant ID so we can find the right record.
Contact
Email support@methodframe.com with any question about this notice or about data we hold.
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