Survey Participant Privacy Policy

Informed Decisions runs surveys for local councils and other organisations. You can take part without telling us who you are. If you want to enter the prize draw or be considered for future research, you can give us your contact details in a separate form. We store them separately from your answers.

Some questions ask about your health, wellbeing, background and identity. These questions are optional.

Your information is stored in Australia. The organisation that commissioned the survey only receives combined results that don’t identify you. If you enter the prize draw your details are deleted within 30 days after prizes are delivered.

We don’t use your information for marketing and we don’t sell it. Questions? Email privacy@id.com.au.

1. About this policy

This policy explains how ID Consulting Pty Ltd (ABN 44 084 054 473) (trading as Informed Decisions) (ID, we, us), handles personal information about people who take part in a Community Views survey (you).

It is an annexure to the Informed Decisions Privacy Policy. If this policy and the ID Privacy Policy differ, this policy applies to Community Views survey participants. This policy doesn’t cover people who use the Views.id platform as a staff member or other user of a commissioning organisation. The Informed Decisions Privacy Policy covers them.

We’re bound by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles. When we run a survey for a state or local government organisation, our contract with that organisation may also require us to comply with the privacy law of that state. Our Community Views research is conducted in line with The Research Society Code of Professional Behaviour.

2. About Community Views

Community Views is an ID service for local councils and other organisations across Australia (each a commissioning organisation). We run an online survey about what makes somewhere a good place to live, how people experience their local area and what would improve quality of life. We analyse the combined results and give the commissioning organisation reports and access to the results on our Views.id platform.

We invite people to take part through social media advertising and, if the commissioning organisation chooses, through its own channels. We don’t buy or use lists of people’s contact details to invite them.

You must be 18 or older to take part, unless the survey page says otherwise.

3. Taking part without identifying yourself

You can complete the survey without giving us your name or contact details. Please don’t include information that could identify you or anyone else (such as names, street addresses or phone numbers) in your written answers.

Even if you don’t give us your name, it is possible some information could still identify you. We treat survey responses as personal information until we have de-identified them (see section 11).

4. What information we collect

Survey responses

We collect your answers to the survey questions. These cover:

your views on your local area, the issues facing it and climate change;
your suburb or town, gender, age, how long you’ve lived in the area, country of birth, language spoken at home, household type, type of home and whether it’s owned or rented, your main activity and whether you own a local business; and
any written comments you choose to make.

Some surveys may include extra questions that the commissioning organisation has asked us to add.

Sensitive and personal questions

Some questions ask about:

your physical health, mental health and social wellbeing;
whether you have a long-term health condition or disability;
whether you are of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander origin; and
whether you identify as LGBTIQA+.

The law treats this as sensitive information. We may also ask about your financial circumstances in broad terms.

We ask these questions to help the commissioning organisation understand the needs of different groups in the community and plan services. These questions are optional. There may be a ‘prefer not to answer’ option, or you can skip the question by selecting Next. By answering, you agree to us collecting that information for this purpose.

Contact details (only if you opt in)

If you choose to enter the prize draw, be considered for future research or both, you give us your contact details in a separate form. In this form we collect:

your email address;
your first name (optional);
your phone number, only if you opt in to future research (so we can arrange a phone or video conversation); and
which option/s you chose.

Your contact details are stored separately from your survey answers and aren’t linked to them.

Technical information

When you open or complete the survey, our survey provider Checkbox automatically collects technical information such as your IP address, device and browser type, and the date and time of your visit, and uses cookies to make the survey work. We don’t add advertising or tracking pixels to the survey.

Social media

If you reach the survey by clicking a social media advertisement, the social media platform may collect information about your click under its own privacy policy. We don’t share your survey answers or contact details with social media platforms. We may receive advertising statistics (for example, the number of clicks), which don’t identify you.

5. How we use your information

We use your information for these purposes:

Survey responses – to analyse the results and report them to the commissioning organisation in combined, de-identified form, including on the Views.id platform. We also use de-identified survey data to compare results across areas and over time, for ID research and to improve our products and services.
Prize draw contact details – to run the prize draw, contact winners and arrange for their prize to be delivered.
Research contact details – to invite you to take part in follow-up research about what it’s like to live in your local area. The research may be run by ID for its own purposes or by ID for the commissioning organisation or another ID client. We send the invitations. Each invitation will tell you who the research is for and what it involves. Each invitation will include a way to unsubscribe.
Technical information – to operate the survey, prevent duplicate or automated entries and keep the survey secure.

We don’t use your information for direct marketing and we don’t sell it. Because your contact details aren’t linked to your answers, we don’t use them to identify your survey responses.

6. Artificial intelligence and automated decisions

We use Claude, an AI tool provided by Anthropic, to help analyse, summarise, format and report survey results. We only use it on de-identified survey data. We never put contact details, technical information or unscreened written comments into it. We use Claude under Anthropic’s business terms, which don’t allow Anthropic to use our data to train its models. Our staff review AI-assisted analysis before we include it in any report. We don’t use AI or any other computer program to make decisions about you.

7. Who we share your information with

We share personal information only as set out in this section:

Checkbox Technology, Inc. – a US-based provider, which hosts the survey and stores survey responses, contact details and technical information on our behalf in its Australian data centre.
Microsoft – provides the cloud-based SharePoint system where we store survey data after we download it.
The Card Network – an Australian-based provider, receives the name and email address of prize winners so it can deliver their prize.
Anthropic (the provider of Claude) receives de-identified survey data only (see section 6).
The commissioning organisation receives combined, de-identified results only. We don’t give it your contact details or your individual survey responses.
Views.id users can see de-identified results. The commissioning organisation decides whether its results are available to anyone who creates an ID account or only to people who work at that organisation.
Others where the law requires or authorises it, such as a court or regulator.

Our service providers may only use your information to provide their services to us, under their contracts with us.

8. Where your information is stored

We store your personal information in Australia. Our survey platform provider Checkbox hosts our survey data in Australia. As a USA based organisation its staff may access our account from overseas to provide technical support.

9. How we protect your information

We take reasonable steps to protect personal information from misuse, interference, loss and unauthorised access, change or disclosure. These include:

collecting contact details in a separate form and storing them separately from survey answers;
restricting access to the survey platform and our SharePoint folders to the ID staff who need it;
requiring our staff and service providers to keep personal information confidential; and
deleting personal information when we no longer need it.

No system is completely secure. If a data breach occurs and is likely to result in serious harm to you, we will notify you and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) as the law requires.

10. How long we keep your information

Prize draw contact details: within 30 days after prizes are delivered to the winners, and in any case within 90 days after the prize draw.
Research contact details: within 2 years after the survey closes, or sooner if you ask us to remove them.
Survey responses held on the survey platform: within 30 days after the survey closes and we have downloaded the results.
De-identified survey data: we keep this for as long as we need it for the purposes in section 5. This data-set no longer identifies you.

11. De-identified data and Views.id

Before we upload survey data to Views.id or report it to the commissioning organisation, we de-identify it. This means we:

remove technical information;
remove or edit written comments that could identify a person;
group answers into categories where needed (for example, age ranges or regions of birth); and
don’t publish qualitative results for groups with fewer than 50 respondents.

Once data is de-identified, it is no longer personal information. We may keep and use it for the purposes described in section 5.

12. Accessing, correcting and removing your information

If you gave us contact details, you can ask to access or correct them, or ask us to remove them, at any time. If you ask us to remove your prize draw details before the draw, you won’t be included in the draw.

Because we store contact details separately from survey answers, we generally can’t identify which survey responses are yours.

Send your request to our Privacy Officer (see section 15). We won’t charge you for making a request. We’ll respond within 30 days. If we refuse your request, we’ll tell you why and how to complain.

13. Complaints

If you have a complaint about how we have handled your personal information, please contact our Privacy Officer. We’ll acknowledge your complaint within 5 business days and aim to respond within 30 days.

If you’re not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the OAIC at www.oaic.gov.au or on 1300 363 992. If the survey was run for a state or local government organisation, you may also be able to complain to that state’s privacy regulator.

14. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. The current version will always be available at id.com.au/participant-privacy-policy. If we make a significant change that affects information we already hold, we’ll take reasonable steps to tell affected people.

15. Contact us

Privacy Officer, ID Consulting Pty Ltd (.id (informed decisions))

Email: privacy@id.com.au

Phone: +61 3 9417 2205

Post: Confidential – Privacy Officer, Level 3, 96 Flinders Street, Melbourne VIC 3000

For general questions about a Community Views survey, email views@id.com.au.