Privacy Policy 

This privacy policy applies to all the products, services and websites offered by ShoutStanding.com, and their affiliates, except where otherwise noted. We refer to those products, services and websites collectively as the “services” in this policy.

If you are a ShoutStanding Customer:

  • ShoutStanding treats your surveys as if they were private. We will not disclose any of your personal information or data collected, except in a limited set of circumstances (e.g. if we are compelled by a subpoena).

  • Survey data is stored on servers located in the United States.

IF YOU PROVIDE FEEDBACK AND SUGGESTIONS:

  • Surveys are administered by ShoutStanding customers. ShoutStanding customers conduct thousands of surveys each day using our services. We host the surveys on our websites and collect the responses that you submit to our customers. If you have any questions about a survey you are taking, please contact Shoutstanding at www.shoutstanding.com/contact.

  • Are your responses anonymous? Your responses are anonymous unless you provide your email address.

  • We don't sell your responses to third parties. ShoutStanding doesn't sell or share your survey responses with third party advertisers or marketers . your data.

Survey Creators & Survey Respondents

ShoutStanding is used by survey creators (people who create and conduct surveys online) and survey respondents (people who answer those surveys). The information we receive from survey creators and survey respondents and how we handle it differs, so we have split this privacy policy into two parts.

PRIVACY FOR SURVEY CREATORS

1. What information does ShoutStanding collect?

When you use ShoutStanding, we collect information relating to you and your use of our services from a variety of sources. These are listed below. The sections afterward describe what we do with this information.

Information we collect directly from you

  • Registration information. You need a ShoutStanding account before you can create surveys on ShoutStanding. When you register for an account, we collect your username, password and email address.

  • Billing information. If you make a payment to ShoutStanding, we require you to provide your billing details, such as a name, address, email address and financial information corresponding to your selected method of payment (e.g. a credit card number and expiration date).   We utilize Stripe.com to manage all financial transactions - your billing data is not saved to ShoutStanding servers.  For more information concerning the handling of your billing information, please visit www.Stripe.com.

  • Account settings. You can set various preferences and personal details on pages like your account manager page.

  • Feedback data. We store your survey data (questions and responses) for you.

We safeguard your respondents' email addresses. Rest assured, ShoutStanding will not email your survey respondents or people in your database except at your direction. We definitely don’t sell those email addresses to any third parties.

Information we collect about you from other sources

  • Usage data. We collect usage data about you whenever you interact with our services. This may include which webpages you visit, what you click on, when you performed those actions, and so on. Additionally, like most websites today, our web servers keep log files that record data each time a device accesses those servers. The log files contain data about the nature of each access, including originating IP addresses.

  • Referral data. If you arrive at a ShoutStanding website from an external source (such as a link on another website or in an email), we record information about the source that referred you to us.

  • Information from page tags. We use third party tracking services that employ cookies and page tags (also known as  web beacons) to collect aggregated and anonymized data about visitors to our websites. This data includes usage and user statistics.

2. How does ShoutStanding use the information we collect?

We treat your survey questions and responses as information that is private to you. We know that, in many cases, you want to keep your survey questions and responses (which we collectively refer to as “survey data”) private. Unless you decide to share your survey questions and/or responses with the public, we do not use your survey data for our own purposes, except in the limited circumstances described in this privacy policy or unless we have your express consent. We do not sell your survey data to third parties.

Generally, we use the information we collect from you in connection with providing our services to you and, on your behalf, to your survey respondents. For example, specific ways we use this information are listed below. (See the next section of this privacy policy to see who we share your information with.)

  • To provide you with our services.

    • This includes providing you with customer support, which requires us to access your information to assist you (such as with survey design and creation or technical troubleshooting).

  • To manage our services. We internally use your information, including certain survey data, for the following limited purposes:

    • To monitor and improve our services and features. We internally perform statistical and other analysis on information we collect (including usage data, device data, referral data, and information from page tags) to analyze and measure user behavior and trends, to understand how people use our services, and to monitor, troubleshoot and improve our services. However, we do not use the non-public content of surveys (i.e. the content of questions and responses that you have not publicly shared) for these purposes.

    • To assist the enforcement of our Terms of Use.

    • To prevent potentially illegal activities.

    • To screen for undesirable or abusive activity. For example, we have automated systems that screen content for phishing activities, spam, and fraud.

  • To create new services, features or content (public data and metadata only). We may use public survey data and anonymized survey metadata (that is, data about the characteristics of a survey but not its non-public content), to create and provide new services, features or content. For example, we may look at statistics like response rates, question and answer word counts, and the average number of questions in a survey and publish interesting observations about these for informational or marketing purposes. When we do this, neither individual survey creators nor survey respondents will be identified or identifiable unless we have obtained their permission.

  • To facilitate account creation and the logon process. If you choose to link your ShoutStanding account to a third party account (such as your Twitter or Facebook account), we use the information you allowed us to collect from those third parties to facilitate the account creation and login process.

  • To contact you about your service or account. We occasionally send you communications of a transactional nature (e.g. service-related announcements, billing-related matters, changes to our services or policies, a welcome email when you first register). You can't opt out of these communications since they are required to provide our services to you.

  • To contact you for marketing purposes . We will only do this if you have given us your express permission to contact you for this purpose. For example, during the account registration process we will ask for your permission to use your information to contact you for promotional purposes.

  • To respond to legal requests and prevent harm. If we receive a subpoena or other legal request, we may need to inspect the data we hold to determine how to respond.

3.    With whom do we share or disclose your information?

We don't sell your data!

When might we disclose your survey data to third parties? Only for a limited number of reasons. Mostly commonly, we share your information with our service providers who help us to provide our services to you. We contractually bind these service providers to keep your information confidential and to use it only for the purpose of providing their services to us. For example, we use payment processors who help us to process credit card transactions. By using our services, you authorize ShoutStanding to sub-contract in this manner on your behalf.

Rarer circumstances include when we need to share information if required by law, or in a corporate restructuring or acquisition context (see below for more details).

We recognize that you have entrusted us with safeguarding the privacy of your information. Because that trust is very important to us, the only time we will disclose or share your personal information or survey data with a third party is when we have done one of three things, in accordance with applicable law: (a) given you notice, such as in this privacy policy; (b) obtained your express consent, such as through an opt-in checkbox; or (c) anonymized the information so that individuals cannot be identified by it. Where required by law, we will obtain your express consent prior to disclosing or sharing any personal information.

We may disclose:

  • Your information to our service providers. We use service providers who help us to provide you with our services. We give relevant persons working for some of these providers access to your information, but only to the extent necessary for them to perform their services for us. We also implement reasonable contractual and technical protections to ensure the confidentiality of your personal information and data is maintained, used only for the provision of their services to us, and handled in accordance with this privacy policy. Examples of service providers include payment processors, email service providers, and web traffic analytics tools.

  • Your account details to your billing contact. If your details (as the account holder) are different to the billing contact listed for your account, we may disclose your identity and account details to the billing contact upon their request (we also will usually attempt to notify you of such requests). By using our services and agreeing to this privacy policy, you consent to this disclosure.

  • Aggregated information to third parties to improve or promote our services. No individuals can be identified or linked to any part of the information we share with third parties to improve or promote our services.

  • The presence of a cookie to advertise our services. We may ask advertisers to display ads promoting our services on other websites. We may ask them to deliver those ads based on the presence of a cookie but in doing so will not share any other information with the advertiser.

  • Your information if required or permitted by law. We may disclose your information as required or permitted by law, or when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, and/or to comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, subpoena, or other legal process served on us.

  • Your information if there's a change in business ownership or structure. If ownership of all or substantially all of our business changes, or we undertake a corporate reorganization (including a merger or consolidation) or any other action or transfer between ShoutStanding entities, you expressly consent to ShoutStanding transferring your information to the new owner or successor entity so that we can continue providing our services. If required, ShoutStanding will notify the applicable data protection agency in each jurisdiction of such a transfer in accordance with the notification procedures under applicable data protection laws.

  • Information you expressly consent to be shared. For example, we may expressly request your permission to provide your contact details to third parties for various purposes, including to allow those third parties to contact you for marketing purposes. (You may later revoke your permission, but if you wish to stop receiving communications from a third party to which we provided your information with your permission, you will need to contact that third party directly.)

4. What are your rights to your information?

You can:

  • Update your account details. You can update your registration and other account information on your “Edit Account Information” page. Information is updated immediately.

  • Cancel your account. To cancel and delete your account, please contact customer support. Deleting your account will cause all the survey data in the account to be permanently deleted, as permitted by law, and will disable your access to any other services that require a ShoutStanding account. We will respond to any such request, and any appropriate request to access, correct, update or delete your personal information within the time period specified by law (if applicable) or without excessive delay. We will promptly fulfill requests to delete personal data unless the request is not technically feasible or such data is required to be retained by law (in which case we will block access to such data, if required by law).

For how long do we retain your data? We generally retain your data for as long as you have an account with us, or to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, or enforce our agreements. Data that is deleted from our servers may remain as residual copies on offsite backup media for up to approximately 12 months afterward.

Security, cookies and other important information

Changes to this privacy policy. We may modify this privacy policy at any time, but if we do so, we will notify you by publishing the changes on this website. If we determine the changes are material, we will provide you with additional, prominent notice as is appropriate under the circumstances, such as via email.

For any changes to this privacy policy for which you are required to provide prior consent, we will provide you with reasonable notice of such changes before they become effective and provide you with the opportunity to consent to those changes. If you do not cancel your subscription and continue to use our services beyond the advance-notice period, you will be considered as having expressly consented to the changes in our privacy policy. If you disagree with the terms of this privacy policy or any updated privacy policy, you may close your account at any time.

  • Security.  We are committed to handling your personal information and data with integrity and care. However, regardless of the security protections and precautions we undertake, there is always a risk that your personal data may be viewed and used by unauthorized third parties as a result of collecting and transmitting your data through the internet.

  • Cookies. We use cookies on our websites. Cookies are small bits of data we store on the device you use to access our services so we can recognize repeat users. Each cookie expires after a certain period of time, depending on what we use it for. We use cookies for several reasons:

    • To make our site easier to use. If you use the "Keep me logged in" feature when you sign into your account, we may store your username in a cookie to make it quicker for you to sign in whenever you return to ShoutStanding.

    • For security reasons. We use cookies to authenticate your identity, such as confirming whether you are currently logged into ShoutStanding.

    • To provide you with personalized content. We may store user preferences, such as your default language, in cookies to personalize the content you see. We also use cookies to ensure that users can’t retake certain surveys that they have already completed.

    • To improve our services. We use cookies to measure your usage of our websites and track referral data, as well as to occasionally display different versions of content to you. This information helps us to develop and improve our services and optimize the content we display to users.

We don't believe cookies are sinister, but you can still choose to remove or disable cookies via your browser. Please note that doing this may adversely impact your ability to use our services. Enabling cookies ensures a smoother experience when using our websites. By using our websites and agreeing to this privacy policy, you expressly consent to the use of cookies as described in this policy.

  • Blogs and Forums. Our website offers publicly accessible blogs and community forums. You should be aware that any information you provide in these areas may be read, collected, and used by others who access them. We’re not responsible for any personal information you choose to submit in these areas of our site.

  • Safety of Minors and COPPA. Our services are not intended for and may not be used by minors. "Minors" are individuals under the age of majority in their place of residence (or under 13 in the United States). ShoutStanding does not knowingly collect personal data from minors or allow them to register. If it comes to our attention that we have collected personal data from a minor, we may delete this information without notice. If you have reason to believe that this has occurred, please contact us athello@ShoutStanding.com.

  • English version controls. Non-English translations of this privacy policy are provided for convenience. In the event of any ambiguity or conflict between translations, the English version is authoritative.

  • About IP addresses. Our servers record the incoming IP addresses of visitors to our websites (whether or not the visitor has a ShoutStanding account) and store the IP addresses in log files. We use these log files for purposes such as system administration and maintenance, record keeping, tracking referring web sites, inferring your location, and security purposes (e.g. controlling abuse, spam and DDOS attacks). We also store IP addresses along with certain actions you take on our system. IP addresses are only linked to survey responses if a survey creator has configured a survey to collect IP addresses. By agreeing to this privacy policy, you expressly consent to ShoutStanding using your IP address for the foregoing purposes. If you wish to opt out from the foregoing consent to use your IP address, you must cancel your account (if you have one) or not respond to a survey if requested to do so.

  • Accessing and correcting your personal data. You have the right to access and correct the personal information that ShoutStanding holds about you. This right may be exercised through by visiting your account's My Account page or by emailing hello@ShoutStanding.com.

  • Your responsibilities. By using our services, you agree to comply with applicable data protection requirements when collecting and using your survey data, such as requirements to inform respondents about the specific uses and disclosures of their data.

Consents

By clicking "I Agree" or any other button indicating your acceptance of this privacy policy, you expressly consent to the following:

  • You consent to the collection, use, disclosure and processing of your personal data in the manner described in this privacy policy, including our procedures relating to cookies, IP addresses and log files.

  • Our servers are based in the United States, so your personal data will be primarily processed by us in the United States. You consent to the transfer and processing of your personal data in the United States by ShoutStanding.com.

  • You consent and agree that we may transfer your data to data processors located in countries, including the United States, which do not have data protection laws that provide the same level of protection that exists in countries in the European Economic Area. Your consent is voluntary, and you may revoke your consent by opting out at any time. Please note that if you opt-out, we may no longer be able to provide you our services.

  • You consent to us sharing your personal data with relevant persons working for service providers who assist us to provide our services.

  • If you have enabled cookies on your web browser, you consent to our use of cookies as described in this privacy policy.