How do participants know which privacy setting is used in each engagement?
Organizations that want to have more control over how they work with the results of their engagements can choose the level of privacy and confidentiality at the engagement level.
Privacy Settings Guide
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Privacy options:
- Anonymous
- Confidential (only available for E360 Package)
-
Default privacy settings:
- For Blank templates: Defaults to Confidential
- Rooms without Confidential enabled: Defaults to Anonymous
- ⚠️ Important: Once an engagement is launched, the privacy setting cannot be changed.
| Functionality | Anonymous | Confidential |
|---|---|---|
|
Participant Response Export report (🧑💻Only accessible via Data Analyst Role)* |
✅ (no name or email) | ✅ (with name and email**) |
|
In-App Anonymity Safeguards Responses with low counts are concealed within Engagement Results to protect participant anonymity. |
✅ | ❌ |
|
Transcripts Participant-by-participant responses are viewable within a dedicated Results page. |
❌ | ✅ |
The 'Anonymous' and 'Confidential' privacy settings allow organizations to dig deeper into their results by allowing a more detailed version of ‘Data Download’. However, because it is possible to infer (Anonymous) or know (Confidential) participants’ identities, we have restricted the ability to download the ‘Participant response export (with or without personally identifying information)’ to one specific role: the ‘Data Analyst’.
Data analyst role:
Room or Account Admins can assign the ‘data analyst’ role to any new or existing user in the Room within Admin Settings:
With the permissions for this role, the data analyst can access the Reports tab of the Results dashboard.
Your ThoughtExchange customer representative cannot access this role (unless specifically requested by your Account Admin) and, therefore, cannot access these more detailed data on your behalf.
If an engagement has ‘Anonymous’ privacy
Participant identifying information is not linked to the responses provided. If the data analyst chooses to download a full record of the data, they can see the responses to each question (associated with a unique identifier) for each participant, but not their name, email address, IP addresses, or any other information that could be used to identify the individual. Even if users are asked to log in with an email address to participate, it is not tied to their responses.
An engagement leader might infer a participant’s identity based on their responses (if there is only one person working in HR and a participant selects that as their team, for example), but it is not explicitly provided.
The data analyst will have access to the Participant Data section in the Reports where they can download all of the information possible with an ‘Anonymous’ engagement.
(Participant Response Export - without personally identifying information)
If an engagement has ‘Confidential’ privacy
Participant identifying information is linked to the responses provided. Please note that Identifying information can be seen by the data analyst but not by other participants. Leaders may choose to use this setting for a number of reasons including a need to follow up with participants or a desire to track responses across groups that are not indicated by question responses.
When the engagement's privacy setting is set to Confidential, Leaders have access to the Transcripts functionality within the Results tab:
(Participation Response Export - with personally identifying information)
For Confidential engagements, participant response exports provide you with information about:
- Participant contact information, allowing organizations to link responses back to specific participants
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This is notified to participants in the engagement's introduction message, ensuring transparency about how their information will be handled:
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Leaders who use the Contact Information feature to collect participant contact details can also find these contact details in the Participant Response export.
How do participants know which privacy setting is used in each engagement?
The privacy message participants see (and are required to accept) upon first visiting an engagement varies depending on the privacy settings selected by the leader.
Participants in Confidential engagements receive this message:
Participants in Anonymous engagements receive this message:
For a full description of how data is handled, review our Terms of Use.