Privacy statement
This notice sets out details of the information that we collect, how we process it and who we share it with. It also explains your rights under data protection law in relation to our processing of your data. Please get in touch if you have any requests!
Overview
Ireland Thinks undertake research for an array of clients across different industry sectors. We really appreciate the participation of the public, our online panel and our client’s customers in the research projects we conduct. Your opinions and views are very important and provide information which helps governments, political actors and business to improve in line with your views. Without input from people willing to participate in market research this would not be possible, therefore we very much appreciate your involvement.
Confidentiality
All information we receive is treated in the strictest confidence. The information we collect from research participants on a survey or focus group is combined and reports produced summarising findings. We and our clients are not interested in your personal details, rather we are interested in the views of this group in aggregate.
Types of data we collect
If you participate in a survey we will ask demographic questions such as your age, marital status, occupation etc. This provides us with important information about different subsets of the population. Collecting demographic information, us to understand how different demographic groups might be different (i.e. differences between age groups, between genders etc). We also must collect demographic information to ensure that our surveys are representative of the country as a whole in compliance with the British Polling Council, Market Research Society (MRS) UK and European Society for Opinion and Market Research (ESOMAR).
Retention of your data
Ireland Thinks will retain your personal data for as long as reasonably necessary for the purpose for which we collected it or as long as the law prescribes. We try to understand why people feel the way they do about topics without having to re-ask the same questions of online panellists.
To avoid bothering people (i.e. 'stop bothering me')
To meet statistical requirements of accuracy we must ensure that everyone has an equal chance of being surveyed. This is an expensive but necessary constraint. This means that we ask members of the public to partake in our surveys and you may receive a call from us or a knock on the door as we must do this randomly. To avoid bothering people who do not wish to be contacted we retain an individual’s telephone number if they inform us that they do not wish to take part in any further telephone surveys – it is only the telephone number that we retain and no other details. We also securely retain a list of email addresses of individuals who have instructed us not to contact them again in relation to any email surveys.
Your rights:
You have various rights under data protection law, subject to certain exemptions, in connection with our processing of your personal data:
-
Right to access the data – you have the right to request a copy of the personal data that we hold about you, together with other information about our processing of that personal data.
-
Right to rectification – you have the right to request that any inaccurate data that is held about you is corrected, or if we have incomplete information you may request that we update the information such that it is complete.
-
Right to erasure – you have the right to request us to delete personal data that we hold about you. This is sometimes referred to as the right to be forgotten.
-
Right to restriction of processing or to object to processing – you have the right to request that we no longer process your personal data for particular purposes, or to object to our processing of your personal data for particular purposes.
-
Right to data portability – you have the right to request us to provide you, or a third party, with a copy of your personal data in a structured, commonly used machine-readable format.
In order to exercise any of the above rights, please contact us by emailing info@irelandthinks.ie.
Online Panel
We are currently developing an online panel to facilitate surveys that require visuals and surveys that need to be completed rapidly. Unlike other online surveys you must be invited to be on the panel rather than opt into it. This ensure that the panel is more accurate and exceeds existing standards in the industry. We request gender, age-group, occupation group, political grouping, and various other demographic information and email details. We do not collect data from other external sources about our panellists. This information is used for weighting to ensure our surveys are representative and for analysis. All information recorded is treated as confidential in compliance with Irish Data Protection law, and will not be passed onto any other party.
Notification of changes
If we change our privacy policy, we shall post a link to those changes on our homepage so that you always know what information we collect, how we use it and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. When we collect information from you, we tell you what we intend to do with it; if we later want to use that information for a different purpose, we shall first send you an email setting out our plans - and it will be up to you whether or not we do so.
Data Protection Officer
The data protection officer is Kevin Cunningham and can be contacted on info@irelandthinks.ie.
Terms and Conditions
For the terms and conditions of membership of our panel please see here: