Acceptable use policy

Participants take part on the understanding that they stay anonymous to you unless they have specifically agreed otherwise. Keeping that true is the single most important rule on this platform, and it is what lets university ethics boards approve studies run here.

You see a pseudonymous participant ID and nothing else. We never expose a participant's name or email address to a researcher, on any screen or in any export.

Do not ask participants for any of the following in your experiments, surveys, or instructions, unless you have written approval from us in advance:

• First or last names, or initials
• Personal email addresses
• Phone numbers
• Date of birth
• Residential addresses, or full postal/ZIP codes
• Bank account or payment card details
• National ID numbers (SSN, Aadhaar, NI number)
• Passport or driving licence numbers
• Login credentials
• Social media, gaming, or messaging usernames
• CV, LinkedIn, or employer details
• Cryptocurrency wallet addresses

Coarse demographics — an age band, a region, a partial postal code — are fine, and are usually what a study actually needs.

Some designs legitimately need them — a longitudinal study that re-contacts participants, or one that pays by bank transfer. Contact us before you publish, with your ethics approval and the reason. We will not approve it retrospectively, because by then the participants have already handed the data over.

Do not attempt to re-identify a participant from their responses, or to link data across studies to build a profile. In some jurisdictions this is a criminal offence.

We do not accept protected health information under HIPAA and will not sign a Business Associate Agreement. Studies collecting health, biometric, genetic, racial, political, religious, or sexual-orientation data need ethics approval covering that specific processing, and a lawful basis under GDPR Article 9 where EU participants are involved.

For the data your study collects, you are the data controller and we are your processor. That means the consent form is yours to write and honour, the retention period is yours to set, and a participant asking for their responses to be deleted is asking you, not us. Your consent form should name a contact who can act on that.

We give you the tools: per-study retention windows, a per-participant consent record, and permanent deletion of selected runs from the Data tab.

Breaching this policy may lead to a study being unpublished and action on your account. Where a breach has put participants at risk, we may also need to notify them and the relevant supervisory authority.