Disclaimers for Surveys

Whenever you collect information through a survey, you must address issues such as privacy, confidentiality and liability. A survey disclaimer will cover these points clearly so that respondents know how you will use the information they provide. This helps build trust and protect you legally.

Here's what you need to know about why and when to have a survey disclaimer, and how to create and display one.

What is a Survey Disclaimer?

A survey disclaimer is simply a statement of important information that accompanies a survey and helps people make an informed decision to complete the survey. Usually a survey disclaimer removes the risk of participants having to make assumptions which might be incorrect.

A good disclaimer should reduce the risk that a survey participant has cause for complaint later on or even takes legal action. It should also reduce the risk of legal action succeeding.

Note that survey disclaimers aren't only needed in cases when you are gathering information across a group or population, such as an opinion poll. You also need a disclaimer when you are gathering information from and about an individual, for example when a gym conducts a new client survey to assess their individual needs.

Are There Different Types of Survey Disclaimers?

A survey disclaimer could cover a number of topics including data privacy, and how the data collected in the survey is used. Here are a few of the different types of survey disclaimers that may benefit your website.

Data Privacy and Consent

Some of the information you collect through a survey may qualify as personal data and come under data protection laws. Depending on the applicable laws, you may need to tell users what type of data you collect, how you use it, whether you share it, and how long you will keep it.

You may also want or need to obtain consent to use the personal data, or to use responses in a particular way. This could happen even if the information doesn't qualify as personal data.

For example, you might run a survey about whether people were willing to pay more for low fat or dairy-free foods. People's responses to such questions likely wouldn't come under privacy laws. However, you might specifically gather consent to use the responses for informing public health policy, but not to pass the data on to food manufacturers to use in their commercial operations.

Clearly explaining what consent respondents are giving may improve the response rate to the survey.

Anonymity

This type of disclaimer describes how you combine data in respondents and whether or not it can be linked to individuals. Approaches could include:

• Aggregating data so that you have a record of the total number of people who responded in a particular way to each question, but don't keep records of an individual's full set of responses.
• Anonymizing data so that you can see the responses of individual participants, but not who they were. This can be useful if you need to spot patterns in data, for example that older users were more likely to say they'd pay extra for a low fat variety of a food.

Survey operators often combine aggregating and anonymizing techniques, along with variants called de-identification and pseudonymization. This means it's usually best to clearly explain the practical effects of such approaches for individual respondents and their privacy.

Liability

This type of disclaimer limits whether and how you accept responsibility for any negative consequences of your actions or failure to act while handling survey responses. This could involve:

• Disclaiming all liability except for that required by the law
• Limiting your liability to a specific financial amount
• Limiting your liability to specific types of harm

Whether particular forms of liability disclaimer are legally valid may vary depending on your jurisdiction.

Limitations of the Survey

This type of disclaimer is mainly used when presenting the result of a survey, though to boost your credibility and demonstrate openness, you can include it when collecting survey responses.

The disclaimer will acknowledge and highlight any limits on the reliability of the survey results and how reflective they are of the wider population. These limits could include:

• The size of your survey group
• Your survey group not being representative of the wider population
• Different types of people being more or less likely to respond to the survey
• Errors in compiling the responses

This disclaimer could also say who carried out the survey and is responsible for any errors.

Is a Survey Disclaimer Legally Required?

There's no legal requirement for survey disclaimers, but having them can help boost your professionalism and keep your survey takers more informed of important things. Even if you don't need them, you will want them.

Examples of Survey Disclaimers

Let's look at some examples of survey disclaimers so you can see the content and layout.

Here's how Endometrix uses a disclaimer to explain what it means to move forward with taking the survey. Users are told that by clicking the Accept button on the survey they are consenting to a number of things, including the use of submitted data:

Nielsen collects a lot of data in its surveys and it discloses this clearly with specific examples, such as demographic data, and voice data. This is helpful to let survey takers know without doubt what data of theirs will be used, and how:

Here's how the Single Resolution Board explains both the techniques it uses to anonymize survey responses and the practical effects for respondents. A survey like this helps users feel comfortable taking the survey since they know their data will be protected:

BGSU goes a step further by not only explaining its commitment to anonymity but offering a practical tip to respondents that they can clear the browser's cache and page history. This is a great addition to a privacy-related survey disclaimer:

Safer Together has a disclaimer that limits both its warranty (promises it makes) and liability (responsibility it takes.) It uses a maximum limitation approach, which means that it is disclaiming all liability. Note that this doesn't override any cases where the law or a court says it must accept liability:

Euromoney uses a disclaimer to emphasize limitations on its survey results. This is different than the others noted previously as it addresses how the survey results should be considered, versus how the survey taker's data should be considered. If you disclose survey results as information to the public, having a disclaimer like this one that states the survey data is provided "as is" and are just opinions versus fact is a smart idea:

Solomon Coyle's disclaimer highlights an important point that could affect how reliable (or not) people consider its survey results. This is a great reminder that survey responses are submitted randomly and may not be accurate, honest or reasonable:

How Do You Display a Survey Disclaimer?

You can display a survey disclaimer at the start of the survey, at the point when the respondent is about to submit their answers, or in a separate document linked to the survey interface. Combining these approaches can make the survey disclaimer more visible.

Deloitte uses a dedicated privacy notice for surveys and then links to this notice from individual surveys:

BGSU displays its survey disclaimer directly before the survey starts, close to the "start survey" button. This placement helps give survey takers a fair opportunity to see the disclaimer:

Summary

Survey disclaimers help people make an informed decision about responding to a survey or interpreting a survey's results. They can cover issues such as data privacy, anonymity, liability and limitations on the gathered data.

Some disclaimers also satisfy legal requirements involving personal data including, where necessary, gathering consent to collect and use the data.

To make disclaimers effective (and legally compliant in the case of data privacy), display them prominently as part of the survey process. Make sure respondents can see the disclaimer before providing data. You can also publish standalone copies of your disclaimer, for example on your website.