The version you can actually read in five minutes

Privacy policies are written for legal compliance, not for the person who needs to understand them. This is our attempt to explain what we do with your data in plain language — what we collect, why, and just as importantly, what we never do with it.

What we collect and why

Account information (name, email, username): Needed to operate your account, process payments, and communicate about your membership. Standard stuff.

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 — it only exists to serve your matching quality.

Survey responses: Submitted to research clients in aggregated, anonymized form only. No client ever receives a response connected to your name, email, or account. They see segments, not individuals.

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

What we never do

This list is as important as the one above.

  • We don't sell your personal information to advertisers, data brokers, or any third party.
  • We don't share individual survey responses linked to your identity.
  • We don't send marketing emails from external partners without your explicit opt-in.
  • We don't use your data for automated decisions that have legal or significant personal effects on you.
  • We don't retain session data longer than necessary for fraud prevention.

Your rights

If you're in the EU or EEA, GDPR applies. In California, CCPA applies. Under both, you have the right to see a copy of your personal data we hold, correct anything inaccurate, delete your account and all associated data, port your data to another service in machine-readable format, and object to or restrict how we process your data.

To exercise any of these, email privacy@aetheropinion.com. We respond within 30 days and don't charge for reasonable requests.

How we secure your data

  • All data in transit uses HTTPS/TLS encryption
  • Passwords are hashed using bcrypt — we can't see or recover your password, even if we wanted to
  • Authentication tokens are stored in HTTP-only, secure cookies that aren't accessible to JavaScript
  • Our infrastructure runs on enterprise-grade cloud hosting with regular security reviews

Cookies

We use session cookies to keep you logged in and preference cookies to remember your settings. We don't use tracking cookies that follow you around other websites. Full cookie details are in the cookie policy linked below.

If something here doesn't answer your question, email privacy@aetheropinion.com directly. We read every message.