Anonymity and integrity

The data is stored by Amazon Web Services, a cloud service which uses servers in Frankfurt, Germany. Your data is our dearest possession, and you can rely on us doing just about anything to ensure it’s safe.

Can I request my data to be deleted?

&frankly act as a Processor and can only erase personal data upon a request from the Controller (your company). So, if you want to have your personal data erased please ask your &frankly administrator to remove it directly in your &frankly account or to send us an request.

Who owns my answers? &frankly, the organization I work for, or me?

Legally, the organization is responsible for your personal data, while &frankly is the personal data processor. Regardless of this, you always have rights to your own data. &frankly only collects information, in this case personal data, that the organization your work for wishes to have access to. Thus, it is the organization using &frankly who is responsible for the data we collect. 

Is &frankly allowed to share data with third parties?

We are not allowed to share data to any third party (i.e. for research) unless the organization you work for explicitly asks us to. We may also not share personally identifiable information when reporting responses. This is to ensure anonymity when answering the questions.

How can &frankly use my data?

&frankly has no right to use data other than for what your company refers to based on the personal data agreement that your company has signed with us. &frankly may use the data primarily to provide the basic features in our service. &frankly may also use the data in a completely anonymized and unidentified fashion to develop new features and improve our tool and to generate aggregated statistics.

You are always anonymous when using &frankly! We believe anonymity is essential to get the frankest answers and most valuable insights. Your employer defines the number of answers required to get an aggregated result (however it can never be set to lower than 3).

Anonymity and integrity framework 

To ensure that all answers are anonymous, we use a number of methods. The most basic method that we employ is requiring a minimum number of answers before we show a given result. For any result that we produce, the system counts the number of collected answers, and if it is below the required minimum, the result won't be shown for the selected group. 

We provide two such minimum thresholds in &frankly: one for average answers (e.g. where an average has been produced), and one for the spread (e.g. where we show many individual answers in a graph to illustrate how scattered results are). The minimum limit is 3 but can be customizable by your organization.

 
Illustration showing the average results and the spread. 

Only administrators in &frankly can see and edit this threshold. In order to change the limit, please follow the instructions found in this article: Anonymity threshold

The second method that is used to ensure anonymity is an integrity framework, which looks at possible situations of isolation of individual answers in the organizational structure and/or by the attributes (such as location, age, gender) defined in your account in &frankly. The results are restricted to be shown when there are identified isolation cases. Our integrity framework makes sure that no groups can be compared in cases where an individual answer would be possible to expose.

In order to address this possible case of individual answer isolation, &frankly looks at all possible differences in the current organizational structure, as well as all combinations of attributes and discrete attribute ranges to identify if there are potential isolation cases where an individual may be possible to isolate out. The integrity framework requires that a group has at least 3 (or more) unique answers. This means that the difference between two almost identical groups needs to be 3 answers.