Shopper research Esomar privacy guidelines

Shopper research with ETS Retail Lab does not record or store personal identifiable data and operates fully within the Esomar Guidelines!

ESOMAR WORLD RESEARCH CODES & GUIDELINES:
PASSIVE DATA COLLECTION, OBSERVATION AND RECORDING

Key ethical principles (extract)
3.1. Personal data
Legal requirements for data protection deal exclusively with the gathering, processing and storage of personally identifiable data. This includes any  information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (i.e. a private individual as opposed to a corporate orother comparable entity). An identifiable person is someone who can be identified directly from the data record if it includes such things as name, address, telephone number or email address. Personally identifiable data also includes data which makes indirect identification possible, in particular by
reference to an identification number or the person’s physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social characteristics and location.
Where passive data is collected that contains no personal identification of data subjects, there is minimal risk of data protection breaches.

Explanation

When executing research ETS fully respect the privacy of shoppers in the store. The research is more than compliant with the obove Esomar guidelines:

  • ETS Retail Lab does not store any personally identifiable information, no names, id’s, addresses, ethnical characteristics are either captured or stored
  • ETS Retail lab does not store any visual information that could reveal a persons identity, no photographs, or video images are stored
  • Only the behaviour (attention for- and interaction with objects in a store) of a person and characteristics such as gender and age are stored as numbers, not as images or video.
  • Video is processed in real-time and not stored.

If data from 3rd parties is delivered for analytics in our data warehouse, such as results of interviews or transactions from cash registers, we will anonymize  this data prior to importing and storing those and not match on identities (since we have none) but on time.