The following privacy policy is made available to respondents – people taking a survey or considering taking a survey – conducted by PhiPower:
PhiPower would like to thank you for voluntarily participating in this confidential market research survey. Your opinions are very important to us, and we appreciate you providing us with candid and honest answers. We want to assure you that we consider your privacy extremely important, and that we take extensive steps to keep your answers secure and confidential, and to protect your personal information. In most studies, we allow participants to respond anonymously so they can feel free to answer honestly.
If we don’t have your personal information, such as your name, address, phone number, or email address, your privacy is protected. In rare instances, clients want us to be able to reach you to confirm information or ask additional questions. In those rare occasions in which PhiPower asks for your permission to ask for your personal contact information, we will clearly explain why and how the information will be used, and PhiPower will serve as the intermediary to protect your privacy and confidentiality. It is our policy that your personal information will never be used to directly sell or market anything to you, we will guard your personal information, and we will not release it to third parties without your express permission.
Our only business is to conduct quality research. We will not try to sell you anything or sell your personal information, and we do not issue spam or unsolicited emails. Our philosophy is that we cannot do quality research without being worthy of your trust. To that end, below are our more detailed privacy policies. If you need help, have any questions or complaints about these policies or how they are being applied, wish to opt-out of future studies, or have recommendations, we welcome you and encourage you to contact us via the appropriate email address, by writing to us, or by calling us using the phone number below:
Email addresses:
- help@phipower.com
- PrivacyQuestions@phipower.com
- PrivacyComplaints@phipower.com
- OptMeOut@phipower.com
- Recommendations@phipower.com
Privacy Officer
Phi Power Communications, Inc. 255 E 49th St ste 14d New York, NY 10017
212-355-2341
PhiPower periodically reviews its privacy policy to protect respondents’ privacy, and may make modifications or improvements, so we recommend that you see our most current version as it resides on our website at https://phipower.com/privacy-policy/.
Below are details of our policy. For your convenience, we have broken this document into the following categories:
Who is Phi Power Communications, Inc, and what do we do?
Children, teenagers, and fair and honest practices
Other Information Readily Available on the Internet
Additional Standards of Integrity and Conduct
Who is Phi Power Communications, Inc., and what do we do?
PhiPower is a specialty, full-service research firm that helps a variety of companies in different fields better understand their customers and audiences so they can provide them with better products, services, and programming, be it better cars or clothes, better internet or mobile phone service, or better television or radio programming. By interviewing respondents who have voluntarily opted in to participate in surveys – sometimes telephone surveys but usually online surveys – we are able to convey respondents’ opinions in anonymous, aggregate form to our clients. We will tell clients, for example, what men generally thought compared to women. We will not give away or sell to clients, third parties, or advertisers, specific, personally identifiable information such as your name, address, phone number, or email address. As mentioned, we typically do not collect such personally identifiable information.
In the rare instances in which clients ask us to ask you for personal contact information, we will only ask those questions immediately after specifically asking for your permission to do so with a full explanation of what information we are requesting and how it will be used. Again, we rarely collect personal information, and we only collect it of adults. All information is considered confidential; is guarded using rigorous security systems such as encryption, firewalls, and proprietary intrusion-detection software; and will only be used for legitimate research purposes. For example, in rare instances we may ask for your permission to recontact you to verify information, or ask additional questions.
Whom do we survey?
We conduct research with a wide variety of people, but follow procedures to only communicate with people who have volunteered to be contacted to participate in research. Some are invited and opt-in while visiting specific websites; some are clients’ customers, employees, or audience members who have given permission to be contacted; and some have placed themselves on lists of willing research participants.
Children, teenagers, and fair and honest practices
Most of us at PhiPower are parents, we care about kids and teens, and we strive to keep our surveys age-appropriate. All survey items are carefully tailored by PhiPower staff, or reviewed and approved by PhiPower management. We only survey children and teenagers under the age of 18 if their parents or legal guardians or responsible guardians have agreed to participate in research themselves, and, in keeping with the final American FTC Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), only survey them if the parents or guardians have specifically given us permission to survey their children or teenagers. Once a parent or guardian has given their permission, we encourage him or her to supervise the survey. We typically ask children and teenagers for their age, gender, state of residence, and general interests, such as their favorite television shows or musical performers, but we will not ask for their personal information such as their name, phone number, postal address, or email address, and we will not append their responses to any other form of personally identifiable data. Further, as with adult respondents, we only report their opinions in anonymous, aggregate form. Again, the purpose of this research is to help our clients provide children and teenagers with more appealing products, services, and programming — it is not to sell or directly market to them. Due to safety concerns, PhiPower does not offer children or teens chat rooms or message boards or Instant Messaging, and due to privacy concerns, does not try to uncover their personal email addresses. While PhiPower has a strict policy against collecting and storing the personal information of children and teens, parents and guardians who contact PhiPower and provide proper identification can contact us to confirm that we have not collected any personally identifiable information about their children or teenagers. If so instructed by a parent or guardian, we will take reasonable steps to search for and delete any such information. Below is contact information to do that:
ChildTeenInquiry@phipower.com
Privacy Officer Phi Power Communications, Inc. 255 E 49th St ste 14d New York, NY 10017
212-355-2341
Parents and guardians can also contact PhiPower via mail, phone, or email to indicate they do not want their children or teenagers contacted for future research — PhiPower will implement those instructions internally and will pass the same instructions to their sub-contractors.
Exceptions
As recommended by the FTC, PhiPower may email a child or teen once without their parents’ permission to respond to a specific request or inquiry sent by a child or teen, but will delete the email address afterward. Also, per FTC recommendations, PhiPower may email a parent through our sub-contractors to provide notice or ensure the safety of a child or teen on its website, protect the security or liability of the site, or respond to law enforcement.
Sub-Contractors
In the event a sub-contractor is directing parents or guardians to PhiPower who have opted in to participate in a study, and PhiPower asks them for their permission to survey their child or teenager, PhiPower will post on the landing page of the online survey the subcontractor’s contact information (name, address, email address, and phone number) as well as a link to their privacy policy, including what personal information they collect, how they use it, and their policies to protect it.
It is PhiPower’s policy, as well as our sub-contractors’, that we maintain respondents’ anonymity. Accordingly, while they may pass on some demographic information to us, such as region in which respondents live and the population density of those areas (do they live in a city or out in the country), they do not provide us with personally identifiable information such as email address, name, street address, or phone number. The sub-contractors will issue email invitations from their accounts to potential respondents. Inside those emails will be a unique link or key to our surveys. Respondents volunteering for a survey can click on their unique link, and be sent anonymously to our survey without conveying any personal information to us that we could use to track or recontact respondents. Upon completion of the survey, respondents are linked back to the sub-contractor without conveying any personal information.
Sweepstakes
PhiPower often offers respondents a chance to win prizes via sweepstakes, and may or may not use a sub-contractor to administer those sweepstakes and appropriately and legally distribute prizes. For each survey connected to a sweepstakes, links are provided from the survey so respondents and potential respondents can directly read the official sweepstakes rules and exclusions (state law may exclude residents of some states), make inquiries, and access results of previous sweepstakes. To protect winners’ privacy and anonymity, responsibility for contacting respondents who have won is maintained by the client sponsoring the study, the sub-contractor, or by PhiPower. Winners’ names are only posted if they have given their written permission for that to be done.
Cookies and Clear GIFs
PhiPower, unlike most research companies, does not distribute or utilize cookie technology, or Clear GIFs when conducting surveys. (Cookies, small files that are stored on people’s computers, and Clear GIFs are used by other companies – not PhiPower – to monitor and track respondents’ online behavior.) PhiPower’s sub-contractors may initially utilize these techniques, but they are not passed to or utilized by PhiPower.
Other Information Readily Available on the Internet
PhiPower, in order to appropriately interact with respondents, passively checks to see if they are running MacroMedia Flash technology and what version, what browser they are using, their current operating system, and their approximate connection speed. PhiPower gathers and stores each computer’s IP (Internet Protocol) address; IP is a number that is shared by people on a particular network or router. PhiPower does not consider IP as Personally Identifiable information, and none of this information is used to track or recontact individuals.
Additional Standards of Integrity and Conduct
PhiPower strives to maintain the high standards of practice established by the Council of American Survey Research Organizations (CASRO) Code of Standards and Ethics for Survey Research, the European Society of Opinion and Marketing Research (ESOMAR) Codes and Guidelines for Survey Research, the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) Code of Professional Ethics and Practices, the Children’s Advertising Review Unit of the Council of Better Business Bureaus (CARU), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Fair Information Practice Principles, and other privacy regulations and guidelines utilized internationally and in the United States.
Additional Resources
The FTC has set up a special Web site designed for children, parents, businesses, and educators at https://www.ftc.gov/privacy/index.html
Public Website (phipower.com)
Whereas the above privacy policies apply to PhiPower surveys (most PhiPower surveys are by invitation only), PhiPower also provides a public website, phipower.com, to provide convenient information about the company and its services. Although the public website does not use cookies, per se, it may utilize automatic tracking methods, in addition to the contact information voluntarily submitted by the visitor, to gather visitor information, improve PhiPower’s services, and offer its services to visitors and potential customers.
Links to other websites
PhiPower’s public website may contain links to other websites, however, once leaving its website, PhiPower has no control over the other websites. Therefore PhiPower cannot be responsible for the protection and privacy of any information provided to those websites.
