Privacy Policy | BallotHut

1. Introduction

This Privacy Policy applies to all the products, services, websites and apps offered by BallotHut, except where otherwise noted. We refer to those products, services, websites, and apps collectively as the “services” in this policy. Unless otherwise noted in your contract, our services are provided by BallotHut inside of the United States.

References to “data” in this Privacy Policy will refer to whatever data you use our services to collect, whether it be survey responses, data collected in a form, or data inserted on a site hosted by us – it’s all your data! Reference to personal information or just information, means information about you personally that we collect or for which we act as custodian.

If you want to identify your data controller please see the “Who is my data controller” section below.

2. Information we collect

2.1 Who are “you”?

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

We refer to “you” a lot in this Privacy Policy. To better understand what information is most relevant to you, see the following useful definitions.

Creators :You hold an account within a BallotHut service and you either directly create surveys, forms, applications, or questionnaires or you are collaborating on, commenting on, or reviewing surveys, forms, applications, or questionnaires within an account.

Respondents: You have received a survey, form, application, or questionnaire powered by a BallotHut service.

Website Visitor: You are just visiting one of our websites because you are curious, or you have heard about us from our marketing and sales channels.

2.2 Information we collect about you.

Contact Information (for example name or email address). You might provide us with your contact information, whether through use of our services, a form on our website, an interaction with our sales or customer support team, or a response to one of BallotHut’s own surveys.

Usage information. We collect usage information about you whenever you interact with our website and services. This includes which webpages you visit, what you click on, when you perform those actions, what language preference you have, what you buy and so on.

Device and browser data. We collect information from the device and application you use to access our services. Device data mainly means your IP address, operating system version, device type, device ID/MAC address, system and performance information, and browser type. If you are on a mobile device we may also collect the UUID for that device.

Information from page tags. We may use first party and third party cookies and tracking services that employ cookies and page tags (also known as web beacons) to collect data about visitors to our website. This data includes usage and user statistics. Emails sent by BallotHut or by users through our services also include page tags that allow the sender to collect information about who opened those emails and clicked on links in them. We provide more information on cookies blow and in our Cookies Policy.

Log Data. 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, internet service providers, the files viewed on our site (e.g., HTML pages, graphics, etc.), operating system versions, device type and timestamps.

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

Information from third parties and integration partners. We collect your personal information from third parties where, for example, you give permission to those third parties to share your information with us or where you have made that information publicly available online.

Registration information. You need a BallotHut account before you can use BallotHut services. When you register for an account, we collect your first and last name, username, password and email address. If you choose to register by using a third party account (such as your Google or Facebook account), please see “Information from third parties” below.

Billing information. If you make a payment to BallotHut, we require you to provide your billing details, a name, address, email address and financial information corresponding to your selected method of payment (e.g. a credit card number and expiration date or a bank account number). If you provide a billing address, we will regard that as the location of the account holder to determine which BallotHut entity with whom you contract and the sales tax, if applicable, to be applied to your purchase.

Account settings. You can set various preferences and personal details on pages like your accounts setting page. (e.g. opting in or out of receiving marketing communications from BallotHut).

Use of some of our services will also result in us collecting the following data on your behalf:

Address book information. We may allow you to import email addresses and other contact information into an Address Book so you can easily invite people to take your surveys or fill in your form via our collectors. We do not use this data for our own purposes or contact anyone, except at your direction.

Survey/form/application data. We store your survey/form/application data (questions and responses) for you and provide analysis tools for you to use with respect to this data.

Profile information. When you sign up for our services you are asked to provide us with information about yourself and to give us more detailed insights into who you are.

3. How we use the information we collect

3.1 Creator

We process personal data about you either with your consent or in order to:

Fulfill our contractual responsibility to deliver the services to you.
To pursue BallotHut’s legitimate interests of improving service experience; and developing new products and service features.

In each of the instances where we describe how we use your data in this privacy policy, we have identified which of these grounds for processing we are relying upon.

You have consented to us using certain types of tracking and third-party cookies on our websites. In particular:

Cookies and Similar technology.

We or third party data and advertising platforms that we work with may use or combine multiple technologies, such as cookies, page tags, mobile identifiers and IP addresses to infer users’ common identities across different services and multiple devices such as tablets, browsers, and mobile phones. We may do so, for instance, to tailor ads to users, to enable us to determine the success of our advertising campaigns and to improve upon them. These third-party data and advertising platforms may sometimes use data that we provide to them in order to improve their technologies and their ability to match common devices to users. We also may use this technology to allow a Creator to measure the performance of their email messaging and to learn how to improve email deliverability and open rates.

More details: The above data and techniques are used for personalized marketing, analytics, and related purposes. To learn more about interest-based advertising and how to opt-out of it, please see our Cookies Policy within this Privacy Policy page. We use this data to personalize online marketing campaigns to be relevant to you and your interests in our services.

We process your personal information in the following categories of data for legitimate interests pursued by us, which are described in detail in this Privacy Policy. We have undertaken to ensure that we place clear limitations on each of these uses so that your privacy is respected and only the information necessary to achieve these legitimate aims is used. Our primary goal is to improve upon and make sure our services and messaging are relevant for all our users, while also ensuring that personal information of all users is respected and protected.

Contact Information.

We use contact information to respond to your inquiries, send you information as part of the services, and send you marketing information (for as long as you do not opt-out).

Device and browser data.

We use device data both to troubleshoot problems with our service and to make improvements to it. We also infer your geographic location based on your IP address.

More details: We collect this to help us improve your service experience through a specific device/browser by optimizing how the website looks in a particular browser, how your screen brightness affects your experience and to ensure the service operates optimally and as it should on different devices and browsers.

Log data.

We use log data for many different business purposes to include:

To monitor abuse and troubleshoot.
To create new services, features, content or make recommendations.
To track behavior at the aggregate/anonymous level to identify and understand trends in the various interactions with our services.
To fix bugs and troubleshoot product functionality.

More details: Your IP address is used to determine where an unknown/unauthorized access may have occurred in your account (abuse monitoring).

Referral information.

We use referral information to track the success of our integrations and referral processes.

Third parties and integrations.

We collect and use information from third parties and integration partners, where applicable to one of our services, to:

Ensure you can sign-up to our service from a third-party integration like Facebook/ LinkedIn/ Microsoft / SSO;
To personalize our services for you; and
Ensure you can use our service in conjunction with other services.
Service and Marketing uses.
Profiling. We combine information about you from third party sources with information we hold about you to create a user profile, which will help us to make our sales and marketing efforts more relevant to you and to personalize and improve your service experience.
To manage our services we will also internally use your information and data, for the following limited purposes:
To enforce our agreements where applicable.
To prevent potentially illegal activities.
To screen for and prevent undesirable or abusive activity. For example, we have automated systems that screen content for phishing activities, spam, and fraud.
Legal uses.

To respond to legal requests or prevent fraud, we may need to use and disclose information or data we hold about you. If we receive a subpoena or other legal request, we may need to inspect the data we hold to determine how to respond.

We collect and use the following on the basis that we have to use this information in order to fulfill our contract with you:

Your Account Information.

We need to use your account information to run your account, provide you with services, bill you for our services, provide you with customer support, and 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 cannot opt out of these communications since they are required to provide our services to you.

Your Profile.

We process other aspects of your account information (like the personal information you provide about your job, your job title, and your marketing preferences) as well as information obtained from public sources, for legitimate interests like providing you with a personalized experience and relevant and useful marketing information as well as to make other product, feature and service recommendations to you and your organization to optimize the use of the services we offer.

You can object to us using your information as described above but in some cases, our ability to fully and properly provide our services to you may be impacted if you do not want us to collect or use the above data.

In relation to Survey Data

Your Data.

We also use survey questions and responses on an aggregated and anonymized basis as described in this Privacy Policy. We will never sell individual response data or identify / contact individual respondents except on your request or where required by law. Feature descriptions will identify where this is feature linked. In some cases you can avoid the use of your questions/responses in this way by simply choosing not to use a feature or by indicating your preferences in your account. See our “Respondent” section.

3.2 Respondent

Cookies (to include page tags).

We collect information using cookies when you take a survey. These cookies are used to ensure that the full functionality of our survey service is operational, to ensure the survey operates appropriately and optimally. For more information please read our Cookies Section and our Respondent Cookies Policy. After completion of a survey, in most cases, you will be re-directed to our website and treated as a website visitor where other cookies may be used so you should read our Website Visitor section if this is of interest to you.

Contact Information.
We only use contact information to respond to an inquiry which you, as a Respondent, submit to us.
How you use our services (applicable to survey Respondents only).
We use information about how you use our services to improve our services for you and all users.
Device and browser data.
We use device data both to troubleshoot problems with our service and to make improvements to it. We also infer your geographic location based on your IP address.
Log data.
We use log data for many different business purposes to include:
To monitor abuse and troubleshoot.
To create new services, features, content or make recommendations.
To track behavior at the aggregate/anonymous level to identify and understand trends in the various interactions with our services.
To fix bugs and troubleshoot product functionality.
Third parties and integrations.
We will collect and use information from third parties and integration partners to facilitate Creators in sending surveys/forms/applications/questionnaires to you.
To manage our services we will also internally use your information and data, for the following limited purposes:
To enforce our agreements where applicable.
To prevent potentially illegal activities.
To screen for and prevent undesirable or abusive activity. For example, we have automated systems that screen content for phishing activities, spam, and fraud.
Legal uses.
To respond to legal requests or prevent fraud, we may need to disclose any information or data we hold about you. If we receive a subpoena or other legal request, we may need to inspect the data we hold to determine how to respond.

Use of survey responses (BallotHut surveys only)

In general survey responses to BallotHut surveys are controlled and managed by the Creator (the person who sent or deployed that survey). In those instances, BallotHut is only processing those responses on behalf of the Creator.

Creator and Respondent trust is paramount to everything we do and so when we do use data about Respondents, we put Creators and Respondents first. When we do analysis of response data we only do so once we have ensured the anonymity of individual respondents (by aggregating and anonymizing the data).

Our goal is to improve the user experience across BallotHut survey services while maintaining the confidentiality and privacy of responses.

BallotHut uses data in the ways described below, for our legitimate interests as described in this section:

The data impacted by this section includes:

Survey type, question type and responses (at an aggregated and anonymized level only)
Device data
Log data

3.3 Visitor

We process personal data about you where:

You have consented or;
BallotHut’s legitimate interests of improving service experience; and developing new products and service features.

In each of the instances where we describe how we use your data in this Privacy Policy, we have identified which of these grounds for processing we are relying upon.

When you have consented or we have a legitimate basis for doing so, we collect and use the following information about you:

Contact Information.
We use contact information to respond to your inquiries or send you information about our services, (either where you have agreed to this at the point of providing your information or where you operate in a business which may be interested in our services and for as long as you do not opt-out).
Cookies and similar technology.
We or third party data and advertising platforms that we work with may use or combine multiple technologies, such as cookies, page tags, mobile identifiers and IP addresses to infer users’ common identities across different services and multiple devices such as tablets, browsers, and mobile phones. We may do so, for instance, to tailor ads to users, to enable us to determine the success of our advertising campaigns and to improve upon them. These third-party data and advertising platforms may sometimes use data that we provide to them in order to improve their technologies and their ability to match common devices to users.
Profiling.
We combine information about you from third party sources with information we hold about you to create a user profile, which will help us to make our sales and marketing efforts more relevant to you and to personalize and improve our marketing/sales campaigns and website experience.
Device data.
We use device data both to troubleshoot problems with our service and to make improvements to it. We also infer your geographic location based on your IP address.
How you use our services.
We use information about how you have interacted with our websites to improve our website services for you and all users.
Log data.
We use log data for many different business purposes to include:
To monitor abuse and troubleshoot.
To track your preferences and create new services, features, content or make recommendations personalized for you.
To track behavior at the aggregate/anonymous level to identify and understand trends in the various interactions with our services.
To fix bugs and troubleshoot product functionality.
Referral information.
We use referral information to track the success of our integrations and referral processes.
To manage our services we will also internally use your information and data, for the following limited purposes:
To enforce our agreements where applicable.
To prevent potentially illegal activities.
To screen for and prevent undesirable or abusive activity. For example, we have automated systems that screen content for phishing activities, spam, and fraud.
Legal uses.
To respond to legal requests or prevent fraud, we may need to disclose any information or data we hold about you. If we receive a subpoena or other legal request, we may need to inspect the data we hold to determine how to respond.
In some cases, as a former website visitor, we may not have any personal information about you (for example if you have not interacted with our site or have cleared your cookies).

4. Information you share

Many of our services let you share information with others. Remember that when you share information publicly, it can be indexable by search engines. Our services provide you with different options on sharing and deleting your content but we cannot delete content from search engines so you need to be careful about information you make public.

5. Information we share

We do not share your information or data with third parties outside BallotHut except in the following limited circumstances:

If you are a Creator that is using BallotHut, your account information and data will be shared with the primary administrator(s) and your survey data may also be visible to other members in your team with whom you share your surveys or with whom you collaborate. Your administrator(s) will be able to view your account data, change your passwords, suspend, transfer or terminate your account or restrict your settings.
To help us provide certain aspects of our services we use our trusted key partners – in particular, we engage third parties to:
- facilitate our collectors for sending surveys by email or text to Respondents. For email delivery, we use (UNKNOWN) and for text/SMS services we use (UNKNOWN). We share the relevant contact information for respondents (email address or phone number as applicable) with these third parties.
- facilitate customers in making payments and/or detect fraudulent payment attempts.
- deliver and help us track our marketing and advertising content.
- help us track website conversion success metrics.
- manage our sales and customer support services to you, including for resolving any disputes.

We enter into confidentiality and data processing terms with partners to ensure they comply with high levels of confidentiality and best practice in privacy and security standards and we regularly review these standards and practices.

We also may have to share information or data in order to:
- meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.
- enforce applicable policies, including investigation of potential violations.
- detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues.
- protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of our users, the public or to BallotHut and/or as required or permitted by law.
- facilitate a sale, merger or change in control of all or any part of our company or business or in preparation for any of these events.

Where we use any third parties to assist us in service for you (the Creator), and they process your data as part of that service, we provide a list of these third parties which is available upon request.

6. Cookies

We and our partners use cookies and similar technologies on our websites. For more information see our Cookies Policy. For information about cookies used in our surveys please see Cookies used on Survey Pages. If you are a customer of BallotHut and separately use cookies or similar technologies in conjunction with any of our products and services, then you yourself will be responsible for complying with any laws related to the use of those technologies and this Privacy Policy is not applicable to that use by you.

We use certain cookies, as described in our Cookies Policy and here in our Privacy Policy, that you agree to when you use our sites and, in the case of some cookies, for legitimate interests of delivering and optimizing our services (where the cookie delivers essential functionality). 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 and similar technologies for several reasons:

• To gather metrics about your survey taking experience.

For example, we will collect data about the number of clicks it took Respondents to complete a survey, whether they left and returned to a survey, whether they skipped parts of a survey and how long it took to complete the survey and other details about the survey taking. However, this information is collated and kept at an aggregated and anonymized level only.

• To make our site easier to use.

Creators if you use the “Remember me” feature when you sign into your account, we store your username in a cookie to make it quicker for you to sign in whenever you return to BallotHut.

• For security reasons.

We use cookies to authenticate your identity and confirm whether you are currently logged into BallotHut or determine if an incident impacts you.

• To provide you with personalized content.

We store user preferences, your default language, device and browser information, your profile information which includes, the level of usage of service and the web-pages on our site which you visit, so we can identify you across devices and personalize the content you see.

• 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 (it helps us focus on the parts of the service you seem most interested in) and optimize the content we display to you (which may include marketing content).

• To advertise to you.

We, or our service providers and other third parties we work with, place cookies when you visit our website and other websites or when you open emails that we send you, in order to provide you with more tailored marketing content (about our services or other services), and to evaluate whether this content is useful or effective.

• Google Analytics.

In addition to the above, we have implemented on our websites and other services certain Google Analytics features that support Display Advertising, including re-targeting. Visitors to our websites may opt out of certain types of Google Analytics tracking, customize the Google Display Network ads by using the Google Ad Preferences Manager and learn more about how Google serves ads by viewing its Customer Ads Help Center. If you do not wish to participate in Google Analytics, you may also download the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on.

7. Data Retention

If you hold an account with BallotHut we do not delete the data in your account. If you are a Respondent, you will need to ask the Creator how long your responses will be stored in BallotHut services.

We also describe the expiry periods for cookies on our websites in our Cookies Policy.

8. Safety of Minors

Our services are not intended for and may not be used by minors. “Minors” are individuals under the age of 13 (or under a higher age if permitted by the laws of their residence). BallotHut 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 customer support.

9. Data Transfers and Privacy Shield Certification

Your information and data may be processed in and transferred or disclosed in the United States. We ensure that the recipient of your Personal Data offers an adequate level of protection.

10. Changes to our Privacy Policy

We can make changes to this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will identify the changes we have made on this page. In circumstances where a change will materially change the way in which we collect or use your personal information or data, we will send a notice of this change to all of our account holders.

11. Personalized marketing

You can opt-out from direct marketing in your account by contacting our administrator and requesting to be taken out of the marketing efforts.

12. Who is my data controller?

As mentioned above – all response data at an individual level is controlled by the Creator. BallotHut can be a data controller of data about Respondents only in the very limited ways.

13. Your rights

This section describes the rights you may have generally as a customer of BallotHut.

You may wish to exercise a right to obtain information about yourself or to correct, update or delete that information. For more information about these rights you can read about it in the privacy portion. Some of these rights may be subject to some exceptions or limitations in local law. Please note your rights and choices vary depending upon your location. We will take reasonable steps to verify your identity and we will respond to your request to exercise these rights within a reasonable time (and in all cases within 30 days of receiving a request) subject to the below for specific categories of person.

• Creator

Where you hold an account with any BallotHut service, you are entitled to a copy of all personal data which we hold in relation to you. You also may be entitled to request that we restrict how we use your data or object to some aspect of our treatment of your data. You can access a lot of your data in your own account when you log in. If you want to exercise your rights, please contact us BallotHut.

• Respondent

Where you have responded to a survey, form, questionnaire or application sent to you by a Creator, using a BallotHut service, you will need to reach out directly to that individual or organization to discuss managing, deleting, accessing, restricting access to or otherwise withdrawing consent for use of, the information which you provided to them in your responses. BallotHut does not control your response data and, accordingly, is not in a position to directly handle these requests in relation to that data. If you are having difficulties finding this Creator or if you have any other questions after reading this Privacy Policy, you can contact us at the information below.

• Visitor

Where you have visited our website and you want to exercise any of the above rights please contact our support team. Alternatively, if your request is for the right to be forgotten as it relates only to our use of cookies you can achieve this by clearing the cookies in your browser settings.