UK GDPR

Who is responsible for what

UK GDPR splits responsibility between the organisation that decides why personal data is processed (the controller) and the organisation that processes it on their behalf (the processor). On this platform the split runs as follows.

The processor relationship is documented in our data processing agreement, which includes the Article 28(3) terms, the sub-processor commitment and the transfer mechanisms. You can read it before you create an account.

Lawful basis is yours to choose

We cannot pick a lawful basis for your survey, because we do not know why you are running it. In practice most surveys land on one of three.

• Public task — the usual basis for a council or NHS body consulting residents or patients as part of a statutory function.
• Legitimate interests — common for customer or member research, where you have completed a legitimate interests assessment.
• Consent — appropriate where the survey is genuinely optional and you are asking for something the respondent could reasonably refuse, and where withdrawing is as easy as giving it.

If your survey asks about health, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, trade union membership or political opinion, you are processing special category data and need an Article 9 condition as well as a lawful basis. Equality monitoring questions are the most frequent case. Say so on the first screen of the survey and keep those questions optional.

Anonymity: be accurate about it

A survey is only anonymous if you cannot re-identify anyone from what you collected. Three features on this platform quietly break anonymity if you forget about them: an email question or an address question, a hidden field carrying a reference number from your own system, and a file upload whose contents or filename identify the person. Do not promise anonymity while using any of the three. "Confidential" — meaning you know who answered but will not report it identifiably — is usually the honest word.

Data minimisation and retention

Conditional logic is a data protection control as much as a usability one: a question that is hidden is a question that collects nothing. Use it to avoid asking whole branches of people for information you will never act on.

Retention is your decision. Responses stay in the database until the survey owner deletes them; there is no automatic expiry, so build deletion into your own retention schedule. Clearing test responses removes the responses, the uploads attached to them and any saved partial answers, which is the right thing to run after piloting a survey and before it goes live.

International transfers

Survey content and responses are held in the UK. Two providers outside the UK are listed on the sub-processor page: Resend, which delivers notification emails that say a response arrived and carry no answers, and Anthropic, which processes the text a survey author types when using AI drafting or translation. A respondent's answers are sent to neither, and automated summarisation of responses is still not built. Those transfers rest on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum or the EU Standard Contractual Clauses. The complete list, with purposes and locations, is on that page.

Automated analysis of written answers

This feature is not built. No survey content is sent for automated analysis, and nothing on the platform profiles respondents or makes automated decisions about individuals. It is mentioned here only because procurement asks, and because a provider for it is already named on the sub-processor page.

What it would send, what would be stripped before sending, whether a survey owner has to switch it on, whether the content could be used to train a provider's model, and whether Article 22 is engaged are all questions we will answer on this page before the feature is available — not questions we are going to answer speculatively now. If you are assessing the platform today, assess it without this.

Respondent rights, and how to satisfy them

Requests from respondents come to you as controller. What the platform gives you to answer them:

• Access — individual responses can be browsed one at a time, exported to CSV or printed to PDF from the browser.
• Rectification and erasure — the survey owner can delete responses; deletion removes the associated uploads and partials too.
• Portability — CSV export, with one column per matrix row and a separate column for "Other" free text. See exports and PDF.
• Objection and withdrawal of consent — handled by you under your own policy; the platform does not email respondents on your behalf.

One practical caveat: if your survey is genuinely anonymous, you may be unable to identify a requester's response, and UK GDPR does not require you to collect extra data purely to make identification possible. Record that reasoning rather than guessing at a match.

Personal data breaches

Where we become aware of a personal data breach affecting data we process for you, we notify you without undue delay with the information you need for your own Article 33 assessment. Deciding whether to report to the ICO within 72 hours is the controller's call — yours — and we will give you what we know rather than a reassurance.

DPIAs and procurement

Consultations that reach the whole population of an area, or that touch health or vulnerability, often need a data protection impact assessment. We will complete supplier sections of a DPIA, answer a security questionnaire and share the DPA before contract. The technical controls those documents ask about are described on the security page; the honest headline is that we hold no ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certification and say so up front. Ask through the contact page.

This page explains how the platform works. It is not legal advice, and it does not replace your own assessment or your organisation's data protection officer.