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SuperSurvey offers several advanced features for your surveys. These include Anonymous Surveys, Secure Surveys, and key-based access control.

• Privacy (Anonymous Surveys)
  
  
• Security
  
  
• Keytypes
  
  

• Privacy (Anonymous Surveys)
  
  SuperSurvey takes Privacy seriously -- for you and for your respondents. One premium feature we offer is our service as third-party "honest broker" for Anonymous surveys. An Anonymous survey is run under our SuperSurvey Privacy Protocol, and requires that the survey owner agree not to attempt to determine any respondent's identity and accept liability for intentional breaches of privacy. Survey owners are also encouraged to include a privacy statement and/or link to their own privacy policy for data collected from the Anonymous survey.

  SuperSurvey, in turn, takes care to discard and strip away possibly identifying information from Anonymous surveys. Specifically, all IP address information is stripped away, and invitation email addresses are not resolvable to individual responses. To help reassure respondents, Anonymous surveys include a "click to verify" Anonymous icon which checks the survey's privacy status against our databases and returns a verification page only for verified Anonymous surveys.

  Please note that Anonymous surveys require the survey owner to specifically request the Anonymous survey be run under the SuperSurvey Privacy Protocol. Survey makers are otherwise free to collect personally identifiable information.

  Please Note - if you use our Auto-Generated Keys feature in conjunction with an Anonymous survey you cannot get the respondent's email address back with the results.
  
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• Security
  
  For added security and privacy for both you and your respondents, you can opt to conduct your survey under Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security.

  SSL is the standard encryption protocol used for financial and credit card transactions on the web. Your survey will be protected by a minimum 40-bit key -- the maximum export level permitted under U.S. law.

  Secure surveys require that respondents use a security-enabled browser. This means that a few less common browsers (such as Lynx) may be unable to take a secure survey, but newer and mainstream browsers such as Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer will be able to take secure surveys.

  SuperSurvey cannot recommend the transmission of confidential, financial, or medical information on non-secure surveys! Customers expecting such information are strongly advised to use SSL security on their surveys.

  Please Note: While SSL is presented as an option for survey administration, the SuperSurvey survey creation process and billing is all run under SSL to protect customer information.
  
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• Keytypes
  
  Access control for surveys is effected through selecting a key type. The type of key mechanism chosen for your survey should reflect the access control needs of your survey. Five key types are available to set exactly the level of access you require:
  • None -- Anyone who enters the URL may take your survey.

  • Single Key -- Single Key surveys have one shared key that all respondents will enter in order to access the survey. This is a less secure form of access control, but it is sufficient for less formal surveys. All respondents use the same key (our Duplicate Filter is available in Results Viewer to filter out probable duplicate responses).

  • Auto-Generated Keys -- Every respondent must have a unique key, which must be generated by SuperSurvey. Auto-Generated Keys are random strings produced by SuperSurvey for use as secure "keys" or passwords for controlled-access surveys. These keys are ten characters long and are composed of both lowercase letters and numbers, making the possible number of keys well above a trillion. Even with multiple computers set to try each key in the survey, it would take thousands of years to try all keys.

    As part of our commitment to good methodology, keys are generated to be easy to type-in in the event that customers distribute keys through a method other than automated email (e.g., on paper, over the phone, etc.). Specifically, potentially ambiguous characters like l and 1 (L and one) are consolidated down to 1 (one), since studies have shown that respondents faced with ambiguous keys are less likely to successfully take a survey.

    Once an Auto-Generated Key is used, it is deactivated; in the case of anonymous surveys, no trace is kept which links the key to the respondent. Keys can be distributed by our automatic email invitation engine, or survey owners may download a list of generated keys to distribute by their own means. Auto-Generated Keys are the most useful in general situations, because keys are individualized, and for regular (not Anonymous) surveys, email invitations can be tracked and responses can be associated with a key set. For example, if you wished to provide rewards for responses, Auto-Generated Keys provide a way to verify that an individual satisfactorily completed the survey.

  • Custom Keys -- Every respondent is pre-assigned a unique key by the survey owner. Keys are not produced by SuperSurvey but are presented for validation to SuperSurvey by the survey owner. The purpose of Custom Keys is to validate as keys information which the respondent already knows (e.g. Employee ID number).

  • Custom Username/Key combinations -- As with Custom Keys, but a username is used as well. Custom username/key combinations are best where your respondents already have username/password combinations that you wish to use for access control.
  
  
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