SurveyMonkey has collected literally hundreds of millions of responses to surveys. People who fill out SurveyMonkey surveys often ask us whether their survey responses are truly anonymous and safe from prying eyes. After all, sometimes respondents are only comfortable with providing honest feedback if they know that their responses can’t be traced back to them!
The first thing to know is that surveys are set up by a survey creator and not by SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey provides the tools for creators to configure their surveys how they want. This includes allowing them to collect strictly anonymous responses, or to choose to identify their respondents.
If survey creators want to identify respondents, they could of course just ask who you are (e.g. ask you for your name and contact information using a demographic survey question type). We also offer the option for surveys to collect respondent IP addresses. While an IP address will not necessarily disclose your identity, IP addresses are often indicative of a geographic location.
How do you know if your IP address or email address is being collected “in the background”? The best thing to do is contact the survey creator, or the person who invited you to take the survey, directly!
Oh, and SurveyMonkey never peeks at your responses unless the survey creator gives us permission to. We give all the control to the survey creator and they determine how public or private to make their survey results. But, we also expect survey creators to abide by our Terms of Use, so if you think a survey creator is doing something they shouldn’t be, like claiming their survey is anonymous and it isn’t or trying to gather sensitive personal information (such as credit card numbers), please let us know at abuse@surveymonkey.com.
For more information, see: Are my survey responses anonymous and secure?
This is the second article in a series on privacy and policies, written by Stuart Loh, SurveyMonkey in-house counsel in charge of privacy and policies. Stuart’s first article covered “Privacy for Survey Creators.”