Privacy Policy

WGR Privacy/Confidentiality Policy — May 23, 2018

  1. Respondents are defined as willing participants in survey research who are appropriately informed about the purpose of the survey. WestGroup Research (WGR) intends that each respondent will be delighted with their experience and willing to participate again.
  2. Telephone interviews may be monitored and recorded for quality control purposes. When recording is possible, survey respondents will be informed at the beginning of the interview. WGR will make a good faith effort to cooperate with all state and federal laws governing the recording of interviews.
  3. WGR is exempt from the “Do Not Call List” regulations since the company is a research company and not a telephone sales organization. However, WGR maintains internal “Do Not Contact” lists of telephone numbers and email addresses of those individuals who have requested not to be contacted by us. In the normal course of research, it is highly unlikely that any respondent would ever be contacted for more than one study. However, requests to be on our internal “Do Not Contact List” will be honored for up to two years for appropriate studies.
  4. No respondent information is ever used for lead generation or for any purpose other than marketing research. Respondents are anonymous and their answers are confidential. Respondents’ answers will only be reported in aggregate. Specific respondent’s answers will not be identified with them to anyone outside WGR unless authorized by the respondent. Only those WGR employees or sub-contractors who must work with the data will have access to respondent information. Sub-contractors will be required to implement the same or similar privacy policy.
  5. WGR uses computer-generated random numbers (random digit dialing) for many telephone studies requiring random samples of the general public. These numbers are dialed up to six times before being abandoned in order to accurately represent the public being researched.
  6. WGR uses customer lists provided by clients for targeted studies. Customer information that may be provided with these lists may be integrated with respondent answers in order to analyze sub samples of demographics, customer status, or customer history. Client-provided lists are used only for the contracted study and for no other purpose. Respondent identifying information will be removed from survey data files before they are returned to clients or provided to associates.
  7. Email addresses will only be used to contact respondents if they have agreed to be contacted or have a reasonable expectation that they will be contacted. This includes respondents who have opted into WGR’s lists or for sponsored studies (not blind) on behalf of clients who have relationships with respondents on lists they provide. WGR will not use false or misleading return email addresses in the survey process. WGR email survey invitations will provide a means for opting out of the survey or future surveys and WGR will advise clients who might initiate contacts to do the same.
  8. Clients may be given a minimal amount of respondent information for validation or for appending client-owned data to the survey results. However, client must agree to conduct validation or re-contact in a professional manner so as not to harass or embarrass respondents. This information may not be used for lead generation or any other purpose other than legitimate and ethical survey research purposes.

OUR SITE USES COOKIES

If you continue to use our site, you are providing implied consent. If you’re unsure about how cookies are used, please read on. If you understand how cookies are used and you would prefer to not have your activity tracked, you should exit our site now.

Your privacy is important to us. To better protect your privacy we provide this notice explaining our online information practices and the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used. WestGroup Research is the sole owner of the information collected on https://westgroupresearch.com/.

PRIVACY

WestGroup Research may collect personally identifiable information from our users at multiple points on our website.

This notice applies to all information collected or submitted on the https://westgroupresearch.com/ website. On some pages, you can make requests and register to receive materials. We do not share aggregated demographic information about our user base. We do not link aggregate user data with personally identifiable information. We do not share personally identifiable information with third parties.

We reserve the right to disclose your personally identifiable information as required by law and when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights and/or to comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process served on our website.

As is true of most websites, we gather certain information automatically and store it in log files. This information includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp, and click-stream data.

We use this information, which does not identify individual users, to analyze trends, to administer the site, to track users’ movements around the site and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole. If your personally identifiable information changes, or if you no longer desire our service, you may update us by sending an email to sea@westgroupresearch.com .

The security of your personal information is important to us. We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, both during transmission and once we receive it.

No method of transmission over the internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure, however. Therefore, while we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

We do not link this automatically-collected data to personally identifiable information. This website contains links to other sites that are not owned or controlled by WestGroup Research. Please be aware that WestGroup Research, is not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage you to be aware when you leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every web site that collects personally identifiable information. This privacy statement applies only to information collected by this website.

We use the information you provide about yourself to communicate with you in response to your inquiries, to provide the services you request, and to manage your account. We use non-identifying and aggregate information to better design our website. Finally, we never use or share the personally identifiable information provided to us online in ways unrelated to the ones described above without also providing you an opportunity to opt-out or otherwise prohibit such unrelated uses.

In order to provide certain services to you, we may on occasion supplement the personal information you submitted to us with information from third-party sources. In the event WestGroup Research goes through a business transition, such as a merger, acquisition by another company, or sale of all or a portion of its assets, your personally identifiable information will likely be among the assets transferred. You will be notified via prominent notice on our website for 30 days of any such change in ownership or control of your personal information.

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement and other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by email, or by means of a notice on our homepage.

Personal Information Collection and Use

Information You Provide Directly to WestGroup Research

If you are interested in obtaining information, products, or services from WestGroup Research you may need to provide us or our third party service providers with information about yourself. For example, you might provide WestGroup Research with personal information on our website in the following ways:

  • When you opt-in for our e-newsletters.
  • When you send us an email inquiry.
  • When you submit a comment on a blog post.
  • When you submit any form.
  • When you submit photographs, video, or other user submitted content for inclusion within our reviews
  • When you provide personal information (name, address, email address, telephone number, and payment information) to make an online payment.

We may on some occasions use information we collect to inform you of upcoming publications or other marketing material that would serve your interest. We do not sell or share this information with individuals or organizations outside WestGroup Research for any purpose, including marketing or promotional purposes.

Your Consent and Right to “Opt Out”

You have the right to “opt-out” of certain uses of your Personal Information.

For example, at the time you are requested to provide personal information on this website and/or through our services, you may have the opportunity to elect to, or not to: (1) receive promotional correspondence (2) have your personal information shared with other companies or individuals.

You may also make an opt-out request directly in the platform at any time by using the unsubscribe link or by sending an e-mail to sea@westgroupresearch.com . In this email please identify which WestGroup Research communication channel or service you are referring to.

Please understand that if you opt-out of receiving promotional correspondence from WestGroup Research, we may still contact you in connection with your account with us. Also, a request to have us stop sharing your personal information with other companies or individuals will only apply as of the date of the request, and WestGroup Research will not be responsible for any communications that you may receive from companies or individuals that received your personal information. In these cases, please contact that company or individual directly.

COOKIES IN USE ON OUR SITE

Cookies and how they benefit you

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile devices when you browse websites. Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can.

Our cookies help us:

  • Make our website work as you’d expect
  • Remember your settings during and between visits
  • Improve the speed/security of the site
  • Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
  • Continuously improve our website for you
  • Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer the service we do at the price we do)

We do not use cookies to:

  • Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
  • Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
  • Pass data to advertising networks
  • Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
  • Pay sales commissions
  • You can learn more about all the cookies we use below.

GRANTING US PERMISSION TO USE COOKIES

If the settings on the software you are using to view this website (your browser) are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.

MORE ABOUT OUR COOKIES

Website-function cookies

We use cookies to make our website work including:

  • Allowing you to add comments to our site
  • Remembering your search settings
  • Remembering if we have already asked you certain questions (e.g. you declined to take our survey)

There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.

Third-party functions

Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Our site includes the following, which use cookies:

  • Videos (powered by YouTube)
  • Presentation Slides (powered by SlideShare)
  • Google Maps
  • Other embedded content

Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties.

Social websites cookies

So you can easily “Like” or share our content on sites such as Facebook and Twitter and we have included sharing buttons on our site.

Cookies are set by:

Most social network plugins such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Google Plus. We may also use sharing bundle platforms like ShareThis or AddThis (we often will try different ones to pick the best).

The privacy implications of this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.

VISITOR-STATISTICS COOKIES

We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g., Mac or Windows, which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at, and so on. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so-called analytics programs also tell us if how people reached this site (e.g., from a search engine or another website) and whether they have been here before, helping us to put more money into developing our services for you instead of marketing spend.

We use:

  • Google Analytics – If you are anti-Google you can opt-out of being tracked by Google Analytics (we’d prefer you didn’t though as this data is seriously helpful to us in improving our website)
  • Google AdWords – This site uses Google AdWords search advertising and the Google AdWords remarketing service to advertise on third party websites (including Google) to previous visitors to our site. It could mean that we advertise to previous visitors who haven’t completed a task on our site, for example using the contact form to make an inquiry. This could be in the form of an advertisement on the Google search results page, or a site in the Google Display Network. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on someone’s past visits to the website. Of course, any data collected will be used in accordance with our own privacy policy and Google’s privacy policy.

You can set preferences for how Google advertises to you using the Google Ad Preferences page, and if you want to you can opt of a                    third-party vendor’s use of cookies by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page.

Turning cookies off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. Doing so, however, will likely limit the functionality of ours and a large proportion of the world’s websites — cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.

It may be that you have concerns about cookies relating to so-called spyware. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive. Learn more about managing cookies with anti-spyware software.

How do I change my cookie settings?

Most web browsers allow some control of most cookies through the browser settings. To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set, visit http://www.aboutcookies.org or www.allaboutcookies.org.

Find out how to manage cookies on popular browsers:

Google Chrome
Microsoft Edge
Mozilla Firefox
Microsoft Internet Explorer
Opera
Apple Safari

To find information relating to other browsers, visit the browser developer’s website.

For more information about our policies, call (800) 999-1200 or email sea@westgroupresearch.com