Privacy and cookies policy

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) specifies that Personal Data (“PD” or “personal information”) is any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person. In other words, a piece of data - whatever its nature - becomes “PD” as soon as a link can be made between this data and an individual (identified or identifiable).

Two types of “PD” can be distinguished:

• information that makes it possible to identify an individual directly (e.g. their first and last names) or indirectly (e.g. their identifier on a website); this information is then considered to be “nominative”;
• any other information that is not “nominative” and does not make it possible to identify an individual, but which is associated with “nominative” information that makes it possible to identify them (e.g. a review that an Internet user leaves on a site is not “PD” on its own, but it becomes such when it is recorded in a file with their identifier; the latter often makes it possible to link their review to their e-mail address, or even their first and last names).

There is a lot of “nominative” information that can be used to identify an individual. Apart from their first and last names, it includes: their login ID on a website, their e-mail address, their telephone number or their IP address. Sometimes, it is even the combination of several pieces of information that makes it possible to make them “nominative” and therefore to identify the person, such as, for example, their date of birth (DD/MM/YYYY) combined with their postcode of birth or residence.

Furthermore, data collected from professionals (e.g. clients, prospects, suppliers, partners, etc.) are also considered as “PD” under the GDPR, as long as they relate to a natural person (an individual) and not to a legal person (a company). In short, only fully anonymised information that cannot be traced back to an identified or identifiable individual - even indirectly from an identifier - does not constitute “PD”.

MIS Group, owner and publisher of our PaidFocusGroup website (www.paidfocusgroup.co.uk), has been specialising in the data collection for market research and scientific purposes since 2001.

As part of our activities, we support large national and international companies, small businesses, research and consultancy firms, public institutions and universities/business schools with their quantitative research (surveys) and qualitative research (online discussion forums, consumer meetings and face-to-face or online interviews, in-home product testing, etc.).

In addition, in order to have a pool of potential participants to solicit for this research, our company MIS GROUP has developed its own online consumer panel.

Our online registration form is designed in such a way as to guarantee all our members (panellists) a free, informed and secure Tripe opt-in registration:

• collection of consent to join our site and acceptance of our Privacy Policy (check box);
• confirmation of registration request by e-mail (an e-mail is sent to the new member's address with a confirmation link);
• then a final confirmation of the registration request via a code received by SMS.

The amount of personal information collected from our registration form is kept to an absolute minimum. All the information that you must enter in this form is essential for the activity of our PaidFocusGroup website and of our company MIS GROUP. It is collected on the legal basis of Consent and is intended to ensure the proper management of your account and your activity on our site and on the studies.

More specifically, this information will enable us to:

• identify you (and link your account to an identifiable natural person);
• secure the creation of your PaidFocusGroup account and your connection to it;
• send you e-mails inviting you to participate in studies, as well as information e-mails (events, important updates, etc.);
• avoid duplicate registrations (several accounts created with the same e-mail address / telephone number);
• pre-target your profile according to the needs of certain studies.

When you complete our 3-step registration form, you will be asked to provide the following personal information:

STEP 1

• Your e-mail address
• Your password

STEP 2

• Your title
• Your first and last name
• Your date of birth
• Your postal address

STEP 3

• Your phone number

Here again, all the information that you must enter in our contact form is essential to ensure that your request is processed efficiently by our company MIS GROUP, and is collected on the legal basis of Consent.

If you don't have a PaidFocusGroup account or are not logged in, you can still contact our team via the "Contact" page.

When you fill in the contact form, you will be asked to provide the following personal information:

• Your first and last name
• Your e-mail address
• The subject of your message
• Your message (and any attachments)

Our online Profile Questionnaires are hosted on our PaidFocusGroup website and can be accessed through your account on the “Profile Questionnaires” page.

All information collected from these questionnaires is collected on the legal basis of Consent and is optional. Their purpose is to better qualify your profile as a panellist and to enable us to offer you more targeted studies that are relevant to you.

In total, your account gives you access to 14 Profile questionnaires (i.e. 14 themes) to better qualify your panellist profile:

1. GENERAL Profile questionnaire
2. Finance questionnaire
3. Food questionnaire
4. Transport / Vehicles questionnaire
5. Home questionnaire
6. High-Tech questionnaire
7. Internet questionnaire
8. Media questionnaire
9. Sports / Leisure questionnaire
10. Work questionnaire
11. Travel / Vacations questionnaire
12. Textile / Beauty questionnaire
13. Spouse questionnaire
14. Ecology questionnaire

When questions in a Profile questionnaire concern so-called sensitive information (because they refer to your state of health, your political or religious opinions, your trade union membership, your ethnic origins, your sex life or your criminal convictions), we systematically implement two measures:

• at the beginning of the questionnaire, on the first page, your consent is obtained via a box to be ticked;
• at the end of the list of response options, you'll be given a choice of "I don't wish to answer" or "DK" (don’t know) (the same applies to questions about your income and your household).

The answers you enter on Profile questionnaires may be communicated to "Panel management platforms".

In this case, the answers concerned are communicated to these platforms in a secure and pseudonymized manner. They have no way of linking the answers we send them to your identity.

The purpose of these platforms is to put MIS GROUP and its Consumer Panel in contact with other companies (retail chains, small businesses, research and consulting firms, research institutes, communications agencies, etc.) or public bodies in need of:

• interviewing participants for quantitative studies (surveys);
• and/or recruiting participants for qualitative studies (online discussion forums, consumer meetings and face-to-face or online interviews, in-home product testing, etc.).

The companies and public bodies concerned can access these platforms directly, select the participant profiles they wish to target, and then place orders to distribute their questionnaires to these profiles.

For example, a ready-to-wear brand looking to carry out a survey of people who buy fashion items every month could, via one of these platforms, access the responses (aggregated and totally confidential) to our "Textile / Beauty" questionnaire, select the profiles corresponding to its research, and then place an order for us to distribute its questionnaire to these profiles.

MIS GROUP uses this type of platform for the following purposes:

• to open up new business opportunities by showcasing our Consumer Panel on these platforms;
• to increase the number of studies offered to our Consumer Panel.

To date, the "Panel Management Platforms" to which we are likely to communicate the answers to our Profile questionnaires are those of the following companies:

• Kantar - www.kantar.com
• CINT - www.cint.com
• PureSpectrum - www.purespectrum.com

The Questions of the Day published daily on our PaidFocusGroup website cover a wide range of subjects (both serious and offbeat).

Your answers to these questions are systematically optional, and are processed in aggregate and in the strictest confidence. With a few exceptions, your answers to the Questions of the Day are not linked to any personally identifiable data.

The Question of the Day simply allows us to generate a daily statistic, which we can then relay on our social networks, in particular on our Facebook Page and on our Instagram profile.

MIS GROUP regularly organises online events and contests to thank and retain our PaidFocusGroup website members (panellists).

Each event and contest has its own set of rules, easily accessible from the pages dedicated to the operation.
As the types of personal data collected and their purpose may vary from one operation to another, we provide you with information relating to the confidentiality and processing of such data directly in the relevant rules ("Personal data" section).

In addition to the information you enter yourself on our PaidFocusGroup website, we automatically - on the basis of legitimate interest - collect session information:

• the dates and times of your logins to our site;
• the IP address(es) used when you log in to our site;
• the equipment used during your logins to our site: Medium (PC, tablet, smartphone) and Internet Browser information;

• the dates and times your messages are sent from the Contact Form on our site;
• the dates and times of your participation in the 14 Profile Questionnaires hosted on our site;
• the dates and times of your participations in the Question of the Day;
• the dates and times of your participation in Events and Contests;

• the start dates and times (e.g. date and time of departure from our site / redirection to the URL of the study questionnaire) and end dates and times (e.g. date and time of return to our site, once the questionnaire has been completed) of your participation in the "Survey", "Recruitment" and "Partner" Questionnaires;
• the time (in seconds) spent on each page of the "Survey" and "Recruitment" Questionnaires (put online by our company MIS GROUP);
• information (dates and amounts) relating to compensation awarded to you in return for your participation in the "Survey", "Recruitment" and "Partner" Questionnaires: the points (or euros) credited directly to your account at the end of each of these surveys, and the gift vouchers (or bank cheques) sent to you by e-mail and/or post.

All this session information, linked to your login and activity history, is stored in a secure computer database, hosted in France and retained for the duration of your PaidFocusGroup account (until you delete it).
You can access some of this information from the "My Account" page, under "My History" (or "Points History").

As part of the activities of our company MIS GROUP, we upload and distribute daily, via our PaidFocusGroup website and on behalf of our customers (companies or public bodies):

• quantitative survey questionnaires ("Survey" questionnaires);
• and recruitment questionnaires for qualitative studies ("Recruitment" questionnaires).

There is no obligation to take part in these questionnaires, and it is entirely possible to abandon a questionnaire in progress by simply exiting the page from your Internet browser.

These are online questionnaires designed to gather participants' views and opinions on a variety of subjects, very quickly and usually for statistical purposes only. To designate this type of questionnaire, our site also uses the terms "quantitative studies" and "surveys".

The answers collected from "Survey" questionnaires are processed confidentially, i.e. they are not linked to any personally identifiable data.
There are, however, exceptions to this rule: Questionnaires involving the collection of personal information.

These are online questionnaires used to check whether or not participants' profiles match up to take part in "qualitative studies": online discussion forums, consumer meetings and face-to-face or online interviews, in-home product testing, etc.

When a participant's profile matches up with what is being sought, they are taken to a small contact form at the end of the questionnaire, where they can fill in their contact details and give their consent to be recontacted and take part in the study (checkboxes).

All "Survey" and "Recruitment" questionnaires put online by our company MIS GROUP are hosted outside our PaidFocusGroup website (apart from the URL link www.paidfocusgroup.co.uk ).

More precisely, these questionnaires are hosted on the following URL links:

• https://surveys.madeinsurveys.com/{identifiant_questionnaire}
• https://live.e-survey.io/{identifiant_questionnaire}
• https://questionnaire.creatests.com/{identifiant_questionnaire}

For more information on confidentiality and the processing of responses collected from "Survey" and "Recruitment" questionnaires put online by MIS GROUP, please consult our "Panel Study" Privacy Policy at this address:

In addition, for questionnaires hosted on the URL https://live.e-survey.io/{questionnaire_identifier}, i.e. questionnaires uploaded to our "e-Survey" platform, an additional privacy policy is available, detailing the data processing specific to this platform:

Links to the relevant Privacy Policies (“Panel Study”, "e-Survey", etc.) are systematically inserted on the introductory page and/or at the bottom of each "Survey" and "Recruitment" questionnaire put online by MIS GROUP.

In addition to the answers you enter yourself on the "Survey" and "Recruitment" questionnaires put online by our company MIS GROUP, we automatically - on the basis of legitimate interest - collect session information:

• your participant ID (pseudonym);
• the start (e.g. date and time of arrival on the questionnaire introduction) and end (e.g. date and time of departure from the questionnaire, after the conclusion) dates and times of your participations;
• The time (in seconds) spent on each questionnaire page, for all your participations;
• the IP address(es) used for your participations;
• the equipment used during your participations: Medium (PC, tablet, smartphone) and web browser information.

For each questionnaire in which you take part, your session information is stored with your answers in a secure computer database, hosted in France and kept for a period limited to what is strictly necessary for the purposes of the study.

Some of the study questionnaires (surveys, recruitments or other) published on our PaidFocusGroup website are put online by "Partner" companies (and not by our company MIS GROUP).

These "Partner" questionnaires can be identified from the home page on our site (where you can find all available studies) by the words: “Survey hosted by one of our research partners”.

In the case of these questionnaires, we systematically follow a procedure designed to inform you of the particularities of the study and to pre-qualify your profile if necessary, before redirecting you to the partner's URL.

Once again, there is no obligation to take part in these questionnaires, and it is entirely possible to abandon a questionnaire in progress by simply exiting the page from your Internet browser.

From the study introduction page, before redirecting you to the partner's URL, we inform you that the questionnaire is put online by a partner.
Then, on the next page, we explain the particularities of this type of questionnaire, namely that:

• once redirected to the partner's URL, MIS GROUP will no longer have access to your answers;
• in the case of pre-qualification questions (before you are redirected to the partner's URL), a link may be established between your answers to these questions and the answers you subsequently record on our partner's questionnaire. In other words, your answers to the pre-qualification questions may be communicated to the partner concerned. Where appropriate, these responses will be transmitted pseudonymised: the partner will not be able to identify you from the information we provide.

When the "Partner" questionnaire is intended for targeted profiles, we ask you a few pre-qualification questions.

These pre-qualification questions are then added to the answers already recorded in the Profile questionnaires, either to validate information about your profile that we have already collected (and thus check the consistency of your answers between the Profile questionnaires and the pre-qualification questions), or to obtain new information about your profile that is necessary for our partner's study.

The reason we ask these pre-qualification questions on behalf of our partner is to reduce the amount of information our partner has to collect to a strict minimum (and to prevent it from collecting useless / unworkable information from participants who do not have the right profile).

Pre-qualification questions are not systematically asked before redirection to the partner URL. If the partner does not want to target specific profiles, these questions are not necessary.

If your profile matches the one the partner is looking for, you will be redirected to the partner's URL.

More specifically, "Partner" questionnaires can be hosted:

• on the partner's own computer servers;
• on our "e-Survey" platform (on the URL link https://live.e-survey.io/{questionnaire_identifier}), when the partner has uploaded its questionnaire using our tool;
• on another survey platform belonging to other companies, such as Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, LimeSurvey, Le Sphinx, Typeform, Maze, etc.

It is the responsibility of the partner concerned to give you access to its Privacy Policy and to provide you with the necessary information relating to the confidentiality and processing of responses that it collects itself: our company MIS GROUP is not responsible for the processing and storage of data collected by the partner.

Wherever possible, we test and check "Partner" questionnaires before making them available on our PaidFocusGroup website.
However, if you find that any of the questionnaires offered to you are abusive and could infringe on your privacy, please let us know by using our Contact form (specifying in your message the number associated with the study). Also, if the questionnaire is hosted on our "e-Survey" platform, you can report abuse by simply clicking on the link at the bottom of the page: “Report abuse”.

In addition to the answers you enter yourself on the "Partner" questionnaires (and possibly on the pre-qualification questions), we automatically collect (before redirecting you to the partner URL and/or when you return to our site) - on the basis of legitimate interest - session information:

• your participant ID (pseudonym);
• the start (e.g. date and time of redirection to the partner's URL) and end (e.g. date and time of return to our site) dates and times of your participations;
• the IP address(es) used for your participations;
• the equipment used during your participations: Medium (PC, tablet, smartphone) and web browser information.

For each questionnaire in which you take part, your session information is stored (along with your answers to any pre-qualification questions) in a secure computer database, hosted in France and kept for a period limited to what is strictly necessary for the purposes of the study.

Information is considered “personal” when it enables you to be identified directly (e.g. your first and last names) or indirectly (e.g. your identifier on a website).
So when a questionnaire collects information such as contact details, it falls into the category of questionnaires that collect personal data.

In most cases, answers collected from "Survey" questionnaires are processed confidentially, i.e. they are not linked to any data that could identify you.

However, there are exceptions, notably - but not exclusively - when participants are asked to provide their contact details in order to be contacted again later to take part in a second part of the study, or to be informed of the launch of the project or product studied in the survey.

In this case, the consent of the participants concerned is systematically obtained - before or at the time of collecting personal information - by means of checkboxes.

In addition, participants' consent is also obtained when personal information other than contact details is collected. This will be the case, for example, for surveys in which a loyalty card number, vehicle license plate number, date of birth (DD/MM/YYYY) combined with their postcode of birth or residence, etc. are collected.

Unlike "Survey" questionnaires, contact details are necessarily collected in "Recruitment" questionnaires from participants corresponding to the profile sought for the qualitative study, if only so that they can be contacted again by our company MIS GROUP or a partner company after filling out the questionnaire (in order to agree on the formalities linked to their participation in the study).

Here again, the consent of the participants concerned is systematically obtained - before or at the time of collecting personal information - by means of checkboxes.

For example, when a participant's profile matches up with what is being sought, they are taken to a small contact form at the end of the questionnaire, where they can fill in their contact details and give their consent to be recontacted and take part in the study (checkboxes).

In the same way as the "Survey" and "Recruitment" questionnaires uploaded by our company MIS GROUP, each time personal information is collected from a "Partner" questionnaire, we inform the participants of this and obtain their consent before redirecting them to the partner's URL.

It is then up to the partner concerned, via its questionnaire, to provide participants with further information on the processing and purpose of this personal information, and to again obtain their consent to collect it.

Information is considered "sensitive" when it refers to your state of health, political or religious opinions, trade union membership, ethnic origins, sex life or criminal convictions.
Thus, when information of this type is collected in a questionnaire, it falls into the category of questionnaires with sensitive data collection.

As with the collection of nominative information, when sensitive information is collected on "Survey", "Recruitment" or "Partner" questionnaires, the consent of the participants concerned is systematically obtained - before or at the time the sensitive information is collected - using checkboxes.

In the case of "Partner" questionnaires, hosted on partner URLs, it is the responsibility of the partners to provide participants with more information on the processing and purpose of this sensitive information, and to obtain their consent to collect it.

In the table below, we detail all the information we collect from our Site and from Studies, as well as:

• The legal basis for the collection of this information;
• The purposes of this information;
• The recipients of this information;
• Rights to access, update and delete this information.

All the information listed above and collected on our initiative (MIS GROUP) is stored in secure computer databases, hosted in France on OVH servers.

In addition, access to all of our OVH servers, as well as to all of the databases and files they contain, is limited to MIS GROUP personnel who need to process them.

OVH therefore acts as a data processor on behalf of MIS GROUP, in the context of its outsourced data hosting activity: