You've created a web survey form using SurveyGold. You've distributed it to your respondents and they are filling out the form in droves. Magically the web survey responses start flowing into your SurveyGold software. All seems well until a thought crosses your mind, "Are my web survey responses being processed securely?"

It's a legitimate question and this article unpacks the details regarding the security of your SurveyGold web survey responses. 

Overview: How Web Surveys Work

Before getting into the details of web survey security, it's probably a good idea to review just how your web survey responses are processed. The SurveyGold software product is a workstation-based survey authoring and data collection solution. It provides the ability for you to create a web survey form that is intended to be placed on your web site. There is nothing else that needs to be installed on your web server. Simply copy the web survey form to your web site. 

1. What the Respondent Does: Any time a respondent clicks the Submit Your Responses button in your web survey form, those web survey responses are sent securely from the respondent's web browser across the Internet and recorded on the SurveyGold.com web site.
3. What You Do: Any time after that when you click the Get Web Responses button from within your SurveyGold 8 software, those web survey responses are moved securely from the SurveyGold.com web site across the Internet to the SurveyGold software that resides on your computer. 

When we say "web survey responses are sent securely" we mean it. Responses are sent across the Internet using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), the leading Internet encryption technology.

Why SurveyGold.com Processes Web Survey Responses

The SurveyGold.com web site is the hub in the processing solution. In contrast to the majority of other web survey solutions, one distinctive aspect of SurveyGold is that it delivers web survey responses to your workstation rather than permanently retaining the data on a web site. Here is why our solution is designed this way:

It makes it feasible to deploy a web survey solution in an uncomplicated way that does not require information technology staff involvement. The SurveyGold solution is hassle free.

It would not be possible to provide such an affordable survey solution without SurveyGold.com as the lynchpin because it avoids the associated costs of installing expensive web server components and database components on your web site.

Protecting the privacy of web survey responses submitted via the SurveyGold.com is our highest value. Nothing is done with the responses other than housing them transiently while the await delivery to the SurveyGold software on your computer. In fact, as they are downloaded to your computer, they are permanently removed from our site. 

In normal usage, the web survey responses for your web surveys only reside on the  SurveyGold.com web site for a few hours. This is because it is commonplace for survey authors to collect their web survey responses on at least a daily basis.

By the way, the web survey responses that are recorded on SurveyGold.com contain just that: responses. There is no contextual question data recorded on SurveyGold.com.

This is by design so that the only place that responses are correlated to their associated questions is when they responses are downloaded via SurveyGold software to the survey author's workstation. You are in sole possession of the survey responses once you have collected the into your SurveyGold software, which you should do on an ongoing and regular basis while your survey is being conducted. After the responses are downloaded off of SurveyGold.com on to our computer, they are permanently deleted from SurveyGold.com 

Golden Hills Software is a business with a commitment to integrity and honoring the implicit fiduciary trust that our global customer base has come to rely upon. To that end, we have published a  privacy policy at http://surveygold.com/privacy.htm which outlines how our web site is run and how responses are managed.