What You Should Know Before You Start

Privacy policies are notoriously hard to read. They are written for legal compliance, not for the person who actually needs to understand them. This is our attempt to explain what we do with your data in plain language — the version you can read in five minutes and actually trust.

What We Collect and Why

Account information (name, email, username): Required to operate your account, process payments, and communicate with you about your membership.

Profile data (demographics, interests, lifestyle): You provide this voluntarily to improve how we match you to surveys. More detail means better matches. We never sell this to advertisers.

Survey responses: Submitted to research clients in aggregated, anonymised form only. No client ever receives a response tied to your name or account.

Session data (IP address, approximate location): Used temporarily to determine survey eligibility by region and to protect against fraud. Not stored long-term or shared with third parties.

What We Never Do

This list matters as much as the one above.

  • We never sell your personal information to advertisers, data brokers, or any third party.
  • We never share individual survey responses linked to your identity.
  • We never send you marketing emails from external partners without your explicit opt-in.
  • We never use your data to make automated decisions that have legal or significant personal effects on you.
  • We never retain your session data longer than necessary for fraud prevention.

Your Legal Rights

If you are in the European Union or European Economic Area, GDPR applies. If you are in California, CCPA applies. Under both frameworks, you have the right to:

  • See a copy of the personal data we hold about you
  • Correct any information that is inaccurate
  • Delete your account and all associated personal data
  • Port your data to another service in a machine-readable format
  • Object to or restrict how we process your data

To exercise any of these rights, email privacy@aetheropinion.com. We respond within 30 days, and we do not charge for reasonable requests.

How We Secure Your Data

  • All data in transit uses HTTPS/TLS encryption
  • Passwords are hashed using bcrypt — we cannot see or recover your password
  • Authentication tokens are stored in HTTP-only, secure cookies that are inaccessible to JavaScript
  • Our infrastructure is hosted on enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure with regular security reviews

Cookies

We use session cookies to keep you logged in and preference cookies to remember your settings. We do not use tracking cookies that follow you across other websites. You can review our full cookie policy at the link below.

If you have a privacy question that this page does not answer, email us directly at privacy@aetheropinion.com. We read every message.