Privacy Policy

Who are we?

Customer Research International is a public opinion data collection company with its headquarters in San Marcos, TX.

At Customer Research International, we are committed to protecting the privacy of our website visitors, clients, and, as a public opinion research company, the privacy of research respondents. We want to provide a safe and secure service where we deal with your personal information. This means information that identifies you personally such as your name, photo, contact details, or data that can be linked with such information to identify you.

Quick Guide to Contents

What personal information do we collect about you?

We collect and process your information in the following ways:

Information you give us

If you’re filling in the contact forms on our website

We will always ask for your consent when adding you to lists and you should know what you’re signing up for – be it marketing mail or receiving content relevant to you from us.

If you’re completing a survey or engaging in a questionnaire

We collect information for research purposes only.

The information you provide will normally be used to provide our clients feedback and opinions on a range of social, political, lifestyle, marketing, and other questions. Data is presented back to our client in an aggregated, anonymized format, unless you consent to us providing them your data with any contact information appended (e.g. email address, phone number and so on). This would be freely given and not a requirement of conducting market research, unless the research required it for a specific lawful reason e.g. to pay you your incentive after completing the survey, or to conduct face-to-face research which you would opt-in to and so on.

If you apply for a job with us:

We will receive the personal data that you provide when you apply. We will use that data to process and consider your application. If your application is successful, then we’ll give you separate information about our treatment of employee data. If you don’t provide the personal data when we ask for it, we may not be able to process your application or contact you in relation to your application. If you have any concerns about whether you need to provide the personal data, please use the link below to contact Customer Research International with your concern.

Information we collect automatically

If you’re accessing one of our websites

We collect IP addresses of users of our websites, and we may also store your browser’s environment variables (this is freely available when you browse the web and contains information like your operating system, the device you are on, the browser version and so on). This information is kept for security reasons to allow us to block fraudulent members of the public, but also to help improve your user experience when you visit our sites, for example serving up different web pages if you’re on a mobile vs. a tablet vs. a laptop.

Information we receive from third parties

There will be occasions where our clients request that we contact individuals on their databases. This information may contain behavior which our client may have collected on you (e.g., number of store visits, a loyalty band / tier, or an internal value pertaining to the segment you are in). Upon completion of a survey, we may append some of this information to the answers you have provided to help our client better understand their customer database, and to help us analyze the data more efficiently. Data is generally presented to our client in an anonymized, aggregated, format and, unless the reward for completing a survey requires it, or you opted in to do so, your participation in the research will never be shared.

There may also be instances where we have lawfully received your data from a sample supplier that has lawfully collected your details and has the right to sell this. In these instances, we would be contacting you as an unknown third party, but the basis for processing is as per the above, only we would be provided with far less information on you, for example just a name and email address.

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How do we use your personal information?

  • To provide a requested service or carry out a contract with you.
  • For example, where you have entered a competition with us, and we are processing your personal data to deliver your prize.
  • Where we have your consent
  • If you have signed up with us for marketing, or to receive market research surveys or services
  • Where we have a legitimate interest
  • If we have legally received your data from a third party for the purpose of market research
  • Where we have a legal obligation
  • We may also store or use personal information where we have a legal obligation to do so

How long do we keep your personal information for?

We keep your information for the following periods:

We have our own retention policy for all types of personal data used throughout Customer Research International. We will only keep data for as long as reasonably necessary.

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Who do we share your personal information with?

We share your personal information with trusted third parties where we have retained them to provide services that you or our clients have requested, such as recruitment for qualitative work, face-to-face interviews, or other services we are unable to provide in-house. While Customer Research International strives to carry out all functions internally, there are instances where this simply isn’t feasible.

We share your personal information with third parties who perform functions on our behalf and who also provide services to us, such as professional advisors, IT consultants carrying out testing and development work on our business technology systems, research and mailing houses.

Where required, we share your personal information with third parties to comply with a legal obligation: when we believe in good faith that an applicable law requires it; at the request of governmental authorities conducting an investigation; to detect and protect against fraud, or any technical or security vulnerabilities; to respond to an emergency; or otherwise to protect the rights, property, safety, or security of third parties, visitors to our website, our business or the public.

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What happens if you do not provide us with the information we request or ask that we stop processing your information?

If you do not provide the personal information necessary or withdraw your consent for the processing of your personal information, where this information is necessary for us to provide services to you, we will not be able to provide these services to you.

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Do we make automated decisions concerning you?

We don’t perform any automated decision-making concerning clients, survey respondents, or website users.

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What are your rights?

By law, you have several rights when it comes to your personal information. Further information and advice about your rights can be obtained from the data protection regulator in your state.

Rights

What does this mean?

  1. The right to object to processing
    You have the right to object to certain types of processing, including processing for direct marketing (i.e., if you no longer want to be contacted with potential opportunities).
  2. The right to be informed
    You have the right to be provided with clear, transparent, and easily understandable information about how we use your information and your rights. Therefore, we’re providing you with the information in this Policy.
  3. The right to restrict processing
    You have rights to ‘block’ or suppress further use of your information. When processing is restricted, we can still store your information, but may not use it further.
  4. The right to lodge a complaint
    You have the right to lodge a complaint about the way we handle or process your personal information.
  5. The right to withdraw consent
    If you have given your consent to anything we do with your personal information, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time (although if you do so, it does not mean that anything we have done with your personal information with your consent up to that point is unlawful). This includes your right to withdraw consent to us using your personal information for marketing purposes.

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How can you contact us?

Please click this link to contact us.

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