Privacy Policy

Voccii® LLC Research Privacy Policy

Voccii®, LLC, a North Carolina corporation (“Voccii®,” “we,” or “us”) is a full-service marketing research company located in the United States, with headquarters in Charlotte, NC. Individual privacy is very important to us. This Privacy Policy describes and defines the collection, use and disclosure of personal data or personally identifiable information (“PII”) and other information by Voccii® in connection with Voccii®’s research services (as defined below). Please note that individual project privacy conditions may vary. Any variances from this policy will be clearly noted for your review.

What does Voccii® do?
Voccii® is a full-service market research firm that provides strategic insights, knowledge, and direction to some of the most respected organizations in the US. We conduct research for the benefit of our clients, who include for-profit companies, nonprofit organizations, and civic groups and educational institutions.

Voccii® collects data from research study participants so that our clients can understand customer/stakeholder needs and/or trends and behaviors, evaluate how products or services are received in the general marketplace, or explore the appeal of new concepts or product/service ideas. This data is collected through online surveys, mobile surveys, phone interviews, focus groups and other research methodologies. We use respondents from customers’ databases, online panels managed by third parties, and Voccii®’s own consumer panel.

When you participate in research with us, these policies apply:

We will not share your personally identifiable information (PII) with any party outside the scope of the research project. Personally identifiable information is information such as your name, address, phone number, and email address.
Your survey responses are confidential. Personal information is only utilized to group responses to provide feedback to our clients. Confidential responses are not attributed to you in client reports, unless you are aware in advance and have provided us permission do to so.
We will not sell your contact information to anyone.
We will not present you with offers for our clients’ products or services unless you permit otherwise or request additional information.
Your participation in a study is voluntary and your decision will be respected. You always have the option to opt-out of, or terminate your participation in, research.

If you have any questions about this policy, please contact info@voccii.com.

What information does Voccii® collect or access?
When you participate in our research projects, we may ask you for your opinions and also for personal information, such as your first name (in interview or focus group projects), age, gender, housing and household descriptors, income level, and other descriptors; or personal preferences, purchases or hobbies. The information we collect is always strictly for use in research studies and Voccii® will never ask for financial account numbers or personal passwords.

This intent will be communicated at the beginning of the project, in survey/project invitations (and/or at the beginning of the survey instrument).
You may refuse to answer certain questions or discontinue participation in a study at any time.
If you join Voccii®’s consumer panel, you may discontinue your membership at any point after joining by contacting Voccii® and requesting to be removed.

Voccii® may receive personally identifiable information from a third-party (e.g., our client) and/or from third-party providers of research panel or email lists. The third-party (client) provides this information so that we can contact you to participate in research projects. In this case, we may be provided, from the third-party, with basic personal information (including name, age, etc.), your contact information (such as email address, phone number), your interests and/or product association, and your connection with the third-party.

In these situations, Voccii® will request that the third-party (the client) inform contacts that they have shared personal information with Voccii®, and how Voccii® will be contacting you.

Voccii® may also have a third-party (e.g. our client) contact customers/stakeholders directly with project invitations (for interviews, discussion groups, online surveys or other research approaches).

In these situations, Voccii® will not receive any personal information (PII) from the third-party. All PII will be provided voluntarily by research participants.

Voccii® also works with third-party sample provider(s) to obtain research participants. These third-party providers will assign a unique identifier to each participant and a participant’s computer to identify and track the computer. Voccii® only works with third-party sample providers to arrange this technology, or to track the online activities of the user of a computer. This technology will not disrupt or interfere with the regular use or control of a computer. Nor will it modify or alter the settings or functionality of a computer.

Voccii® and its third-party sample providers use the unique identifier to assist our clients in safeguarding the integrity of survey results (to ensure that one person does not complete a survey multiple times or to ensure participants are not robots or automated survey completion programs).

How does Voccii® use personal information (PII)?
Research project participant information is used exclusively for research purposes. Voccii® will never attempt to sell our participants anything (or share personal information with clients to use for sales purposes); we are only interested in gathering opinions and aggregating that data to produce insights for our clients. When you complete a research project, your survey responses are confidentially handled. We generally combine your survey responses with the responses of others who participate in the survey and report the aggregated responses (without identifying the individual respondents) to the client that commissioned the study.

Third Party Sources: In most cases, Voccii® does not have a direct relationship with the individuals whose personal data it processes when we act as a provider of market research services. If you are a participant or former participant of one of our client companies or with one of our research partners (panel providers or recruiters), and would no longer like to be contacted for research projects, please contact the specific company that you interact with directly.

Clients who hire Voccii® to conduct market research are generally not provided with participant level survey data that includes personally identifiable information, other than demographic information needed to analyze data (e.g., gender, income level, etc.). However, on some occasions our clients request contact information or customer IDs of research participants for record keeping, authentication or other business purposes. You will be informed before choosing to participate in such a study (or opting not to participate).

Research participants will always be informed in advance if their input is being audio- or videotaped, or if there are clients observing the research process (such as in a focus group). Participants will have the option to excuse themselves from a taped or observed research project if they do not wish to participate. Voccii®’s partners in these types of projects (recruiters, focus group facilities, etc.) will also advise participants they will be observed and/or taped during the recruiting process.

Voccii® may also use your personal information to contact you for any of the following reasons:

To invite you to join the research panel, or to follow up on registration for the panel;
To conduct a survey research interview;
To follow up on, clarify or validate answers you gave in a survey we conducted;
For Panel members: To update our records on the accuracy of your personal information;
To notify you if you have won a sweepstakes conducted on behalf of our client;
To ask for your permission to use your personal information for a purpose that was not identified to you when we first collected your personal information;
Another reason that was explained during the research process.

When Voccii® reaches out to respondents by telephone or in person, we will identify ourselves and state the purpose(s) of the contact. Our emailed survey invitations or other email communications clearly identify us as Voccii® and explain the purpose(s) of our contact.

Exceptions: The only exceptions when we may disclose your identifiable information or survey responses to unaffiliated third parties are as follows:

You consent to provide personal information (email, address or other contact information) as part of an incentive or rewards fulfillment process. Voccii® uses a third-party partner to administer incentives (for example, Rybbon). The process requires participants to provide an email address to receive an electronic gift card. This partner follows strict privacy protocols to ensure the privacy and security of research participants requesting incentives. Participants may also opt not to receive an incentive (and not share personal information).
You consent to sharing your identifying information and individual responses with an unaffiliated third party for a specified purpose.
If we work with a third party (such as an analytical/tabulation firm or other research-support organization) who is contractually bound to keep the disclosed information in a confidential and protected manner and use it only for research or statistical purposes.
In certain instances, such as to protect someone’s safety, to protect our rights or property, or when required to do so by law (including to meet national security or law enforcement requirements), Voccii® may disclose your personal information to a third-party.

Where we share your personally identifiable information or survey responses with non-affiliated service providers (both within and outside the United States) for survey research operations or incentive fulfillment, they are contractually bound to keep such information confidential and to protect it with reasonable security standards and practices.

Your personally identifiable information may be transferred if Voccii® is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of all or a portion of its assets. In such cases, the receiving entity would be required to comply with our privacy policy requirements.

How does Voccii® manage security of PII?
We have put in place reasonable administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to protect against unauthorized access to the information we collect. Access to research participant personal information is restricted and limited to Voccii® staff members and authorized third parties who have an explicit need to access such information for a legitimate business purpose, such as sending email invitations, hosting an online survey or processing data. We take precautions to protect personally identifiable information in our possession from loss, disclosure, alteration and destruction, misuse and unauthorized access.

Voccii®’s online survey platform provider maintains security measures for all data that is industry and HIPAA compliant.

However, no security measures are 100% impregnable and we cannot guarantee against all potential security breaches. Moreover, the transmission of information over the Internet is not inherently secure, and we are not responsible for the transmission of information over networks that we do not control. Your use of our services, including participation in research projects, demonstrates your assumption of these risks. If you have any questions about security of our services, you may send us an email at the address indicated.

Does Voccii® send unsolicited email invitations using PII?
Voccii® does not intentionally “spam” email addresses to seek participation in surveys. We send e-mail invitations only to people who we believe have “opted in” (i.e., agreed to receive invitations) to research or marketing communications/invitations.

This may include lists of email addresses purchased from third-party providers to meet targeted criteria.
We will give every person who receives an email invitation the opportunity to “opt out” of that invitation and all future emails.
We do not knowingly invite children under the age of 13 to participate in research studies without taking measures to obtain parental consent.

Does Voccii® use Cookies?
There are situations in which Voccii® may employ the use of cookies. These include Voccii®’s website (https://voccii.com), and online survey platforms for the collection of research data.

Voccii®’s Website:
Voccii®, and the third parties we engage to perform analytics services, may automatically collect certain general information when you access our website, via Cookies, Log Files, Web Beacons, Flash LSOs and other tracking technologies. We and the third parties we engage may use this information to administer and improve our website and the content on it, including to track user movements around the website, to gather usage information and statistics about how our website is used, to permit users to log in or enroll in our consumer panel, blog delivery or other services, to store user preferences, and to customize content. We do not use cookies for marketing or advertising purposes.

We may combine the information we have automatically collected from you with other information we collect about you. We do this to improve services we offer you, to improve, analytics, or website functionality, and to develop new products and services. The following are some examples of information we may collect:

Voccii® website pages you view
Emails that you open or forward
Links you click on
Forms you complete

We, and the third parties we engage to perform analytics services, may use both session ID cookies and persistent cookies.

We use session-based cookies in order to store language and other country specific preferences such as support contact information. Voccii® may also utilize cookies to track internal metrics of website usage. A session ID cookie expires when you close your browser.
A persistent cookie remains on your hard drive for an extended period of time. Persistent cookies also enable us to track and target the interests of our users to enhance the experience on our site. You can remove persistent cookies by following directions provided in your Internet browser’s “help” file.

You can choose to accept or decline cookies. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer, however, this may prevent you from taking full advantage of the website.

As is true of most websites, we gather certain information automatically and store it in log files. This information may include Internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp, and/or clickstream data. We do not link this automatically collected data to other information we collect about you.

Third parties with whom we partner to provide certain features on our website may use HTML5 to collect and store information. Various browsers may offer their own management tools for removing HTML5.

Online Survey Platforms:
Voccii® may partner with third party vendors, who may adopt features which are utilized for quality control and validation purposes, and for fraud detection and/or prevention, including the identification of duplicate or fraudulent respondents. These features may include “digital fingerprinting” (whereby a unique identifier is assigned to a specific device or computer based on its settings, including technical settings, characteristics, and IP address) and/or “watermarking” features (which involves the placement of a technology or file on a device or computer to identify that it has previously been used to register or access on the marketing research website, survey opportunity, panel, etc.). The cookies may also enable you to navigate the online survey platform and, in some cases, allows you to resume a survey if you have had to stop.

The online survey platform used by Voccii® gathers certain information automatically. This information may include internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider, referring/exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp, and clickstream data. Depending on the nature of the project, it may also collect limited information about your system configuration such as screen resolution and preferred language in order to determine the best possible presentation of an online questionnaire.

This information will never be released to a third party, such as a client, and is used to ensure data quality and identify/safeguard against robots and fraudulent participants. The cookies do not collect information from other sites you may visit.

How long does Voccii® keep PII?
We will retain the personally identifiable information described above for as long as the information has value as part of the services we offer, or as long as is necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements, whichever is longer.

If you wish to request that we no longer use your personally identifiable information in our services, please email us at info@voccii.com.

Complaints and Requests
We are committed to client and consumer privacy and handling all data with respect. Any concern or complaint is logged and tracked through a reporting and resolution process. Please report any concern to info@voccii.com.

The parties agree to first attempt informal resolution of any dispute before initiating formal proceedings. The parties shall work together in good faith to find an agreeable resolution within 30 days after notice is given or a complaint is reported.
If the parties cannot find an agreeable resolution, you and we agree to binding individual arbitration in the state of North Carolina or another location mutually agreeable to the parties. An award of arbitration may be confirmed in a court of competent jurisdiction.
Class action lawsuits, class-wide arbitrations, private attorney-general actions, and any other proceeding where someone acts in a representative capacity are not allowed. Nor is combining individual proceedings without the consent of all parties.

Should action be required to rectify a privacy, security or customer service concern the proper persons at Voccii® LLC and/or the research sponsoring organization will be notified, as per our business requirements. All issues will be monitored and tracked through resolution and the appropriate stakeholders notified.

Exceptions to our Privacy Policy
Any exceptions to this Privacy Policy in terms of what data is collected, how it is collected or how it is used will be explicitly disclosed before the data is collected. Additional consent will always be asked and respondents can always opt-out if they choose.

Changes to Our Privacy Policy
Voccii® will review and update this Privacy Policy periodically to respond to changing legal, technical and business developments. We will note the date of its most recent revision herein. Please review this Privacy Policy frequently to be informed of your rights and how Voccii® is protecting your Personal Data.

How to reach us
Questions regarding this policy can be communicated via mail, phone or email:

Voccii®, LLC
15105-D John J Delaney Dr.
Suite 325
Charlotte, NC 28277

704-247-6160
info@voccii.com.

Last modified January 15, 2021.