Privacy Statement

Our work and our clients

We conduct telephone market research all over the world from our callcenters to service the needs of our clients and their clients in understanding you, the market you live and work in, and the products and services that you use.

Our research is conducted on behalf of a range of clients, such as research- and consultancy agencies contracted by commercial companies and government agencies and NGOs.

We only carry out research. Your participation will never result in sales or marketing communication from us, our clients, or any linked third-party.

Why and how we contact you

Any communication you receive from us, such as e-mail invitations or phone calls, will clearly identify us and explain the purpose(s) of our contact.

When we contact you, it will generally be to conduct a telephone interview as part of a survey. We may occasionally contact you for other purposes; we would have asked for your permission upfront before contacting you again. If we contact you for any other reason, we will always ensure the purpose is compatible with your previous consent.

In nearly all cases, we will only process your data based on your informed consent to do so.

The contact details we have for you can come from a variety of sources. We will always let you know what the source of your contact details were when you speak to us.

• If we are contacting you by e-mail, you had spoken to us previously and you indicated an interest in taking part in further and similar types of research. At this point, you would have shared an e-mail address we can use for this purpose. Alternatively, we may be contacting you on behalf of our client. If they provide you with products and services, they could have asked us, as an independent data collection agency, to speak with you to understand how satisfied you are with them. The privacy notice of our client will mention they sometimes share your details and work with companies such as ours for market research purpose.
• If we are contacting you by phone, the above still applies but we may also have found your phone number on publicly available databases, because we think you meet the criteria of our research. This process is called ‘desk research’ and helps us reach appropriate research candidates by phone, based on country of residence, job title, or industry sector. We sometimes also work with third-party vendors that build lists of publicly available information to help us reach the right individuals.

Data we collect

Via our website

 

Our contact form will collect the following information from you: a name, e-mail address, the name of your company and a telephone number. This allows us to help you with your query and provide any feedback we may have.

If you are applying to join our telephone research teams, we’ll ask for the same kind of information, but we’ll also ask for your address so that we can check whether you’d find it easy to reach us for work, and of course we’ll need to know which languages you speak. You can also choose to include a CV to your submitted form for our team to review.

 

Via telephone interviews

 

As we will tell you whenever speaking with you over the phone, we record all of our calls to ensure our teams are treating you fairly, working in a professional and courteous manner, and delivering a level of service that meets our internal standards and those of the relevant Codes of Conduct. We will always confirm this is fine with you before proceeding with the call, and these recordings will never be shared with anyone other than individuals whose role at GDCC includes responsibility for quality control – unless there is a separate purpose for which these recordings are needed, such as analysis, in which case we will ask you to consent to this separately before proceeding with the call.

Our role in the processing of your data

Who is responsible for your data?

When we get in touch with you, we will always tell you who we are and provide the name(s) of the data controller(s) that decided how your data should be processed. Most of the time, we are commissioned by our clients to get in touch with you, either as named individuals or as professionals that fit within the category of respondents being researched, and this means that they are the data controller, i.e. without them, no data processing would have occurred. This applies even if your relationship is with us, and they will never receive any of your personal data (if that were ever the case, we would ask for your informed, specific consent before doing so). Depending on the circumstances, we may be joint data controllers. Because you enter in a relationship with us when you take part in our surveys, we have a legal obligation to give effect to some of your rights, should you choose to exercise them.

Data controllers and data processor

Who is responsible for your data?

In a market research survey, different parties come together to form the ‘research chain’. It begins with the research sponsor, the company that decides they want to run a market research project. Next comes the research agency that designs the survey and will report its findings back to the research sponsor. Then comes the fieldwork agency (in this case GDCC) that implements the survey online or over the phone and speaks to respondents all the over the world to collect the opinions and insights that are needed to write the reports. In addition, some other third-parties might get involved to help with some specialized elements of the project, which will vary widely project by project.

Under the applicable data protection legislation, a data controller is the entity that determines the purpose for which (“why”) and the manner in which (“how”) data is processed. On the other hand, a data processor will act on the specific instructions of the data controller and hold your details for only as long as necessary to complete the work requested of them by the data controller. In any market research project, there will often be more than one data controller and it may also include the support of multiple data processors. All of these parties are legally-bound to protect your privacy and give effect to your rights provided by GDPR.

 

Exercising your rights provided under GDPR

Access

At any time, you can request access to the personal data we hold about you. Once you get in touch, we will need to determine whether we are the data controller for your personal details. If we are not, we will ask you to get in touch, speak directly with the data controller or ask you if we can get in touch with them on your behalf. If we are the data controller, you may be able to access this personal data, and correct, amend or delete it, except in the following circumstances:

• The cost of doing so would be disproportionate and unreasonable; or
• We could not release your data without releasing data from other individuals, or confidential commercial information of GDCC or our clients

Portability

Based on your consent for us to process data, you also have a right to portability, which means you can request to receive personal data you provided to us in a format that is easy to read and that could be reused by others, if you wanted to share it with another data controller.

Rectification

You can also ask us to rectify the records we hold on you. Inaccurate information can lead to frustration or misleading communication, and we are committed to making sure the information we hold on you is as accurate as possible. We work hard to keep personal information in our control accurate, complete, current and relevant, based on the most recent information available to us. We rely on you to help us keep your personal information accurate and current by answering our questions honestly.

Erasure

You also have a right to erasure, also known as the ‘right to be forgotten’. If you consented to our holding or processing your data, you have a right to have any data we hold for you erased if you want to withdraw your consent. Because we often contact you on behalf of other companies that may have shared your contact details with us, we will sometimes need to get back to the company that shared your details and advise them of your decision to withdraw consent. There are limits to what this right to erasure can accomplish: if we erase all your details, we may be in contact with you again by random chance simply because market research must often get in touch with a representative sample of the population; it does not mean we kept your details, but that they came up in random sample selection.