Privacy Policy

1. Data we process

We process account details, billing identifiers, server configuration, login branding assets, deployment metadata, and operational metrics required to run your hosted server.

If you use the research workspace, we may process uploaded audio, transcripts, XLSForm workbooks, form metadata, and derived files that you ask us to create. These may contain personal or sensitive research data. You remain responsible for having a lawful basis, participant notice, consent, ethics approval, and retention plan appropriate to your study.

Location Data: We automatically detect your approximate location (country, region, city) based on your IP address when you sign up or log in. This helps us improve service security, optimize infrastructure, and understand our user base. Location data is collected without requiring any input from you.

2. How we use data

• Provision, update, and monitor hosted servers.
• Apply branding and other server settings.
• Process billing and support requests.
• Improve reliability, diagnostics, and product operations.
• Run transcription only after a project-level external-AI approval is recorded.
• Run translation or analysis only after the transcript privacy review is acknowledged.

3. Sharing and retention

We share data with infrastructure, storage, payment, email, and AI processing providers only when required for the feature you use. Provider categories and the security disclosures we currently rely on are described on the Security page. We do not sell customer research data. Project retention settings can trigger deletion of stored audio and derived research records; choose a period that matches your ethics and legal obligations.

4. Hosted server data

Customer survey responses, form submissions, uploaded media, and ODK project content are stored inside the customer's hosted ODK Central environment. SurveyLoopr does not use customer survey response data for advertising or unrelated product analytics.

SurveyLoopr may access a hosted server when needed to provision, maintain, troubleshoot, secure, migrate, pause, resume, or delete that server, or when a customer asks us to provide support. Customers are responsible for managing ODK Central users, roles, projects, forms, and respondent data inside their hosted environment.

5. Security and hosting

SurveyLoopr hosts ODK Central servers on Hetzner Cloud infrastructure and uses isolated server instances for hosted ODK environments. Hetzner provides data processing terms, technical and organizational measures, and cloud security certifications for its infrastructure. Location is assigned by Hetzner during provisioning. SurveyLoopr does not currently expose a customer-facing region selector. Other processors (storage, payment, email and AI processing) are kept in our internal processor register and summarized on the Security page.

Hosted ODK Central servers are configured for HTTPS access. HTTPS protects data in transit; it does not by itself protect stored submissions from server compromise or privileged access. For sensitive submissions, enable ODK form encryption, store the private key outside SurveyLoopr, and test recovery before fieldwork.

6. Backups, pause, and deletion

Hosted servers are provisioned with automated daily backups and monitored for backup-status drift. If a backup-control failure is detected, SurveyLoopr alerts its operator and retries remediation. Backups are a recovery control, not a substitute for ODK form encryption or customer exports. If a server is deleted, related hosting resources and operational records are removed according to the applicable service workflow and retention requirements.

7. Future analytics

If SurveyLoopr adds analytics or data-visualization features in the future, we may process server-level usage and operational data to deliver those features. Those features will remain subject to the same privacy commitments and service controls described here.

8. Security and contact

We take reasonable technical and organizational steps to protect the data we handle, including private storage, short-lived access links, access controls, audit records for privacy decisions, and deletion workflows. These controls are not a promise of a particular certification or legal outcome. For privacy questions or requests, contact [email protected].