Category: Website - SurveyGold

Now Available Online: SurveyGold Software Update Log

5/9/2015

View the SurveyGold Solution Update Log

As SurveyGold application software and online services evolve and improve over time, we maintain a list of updated features and capabilities so that you can see what we are developing, enhancing, fixing and changing.

This list has always been available when performing a SurveyGold application update. Now we are making it available via our website so that the updates can be accessed by anyone at anytime.

SurveyGold Is Not Vulnerable to the Heartbleed Bug

4/9/2014

The Heartbleed Bug has been a troublesome headline in the news recently. We want to assure you that all servers used by the SurveyGold survey solution are running OpenSSL version 1.0.1g, the most current version of OpenSSL. As a result, our servers are not vulnerable to the Heartbleed Bug which has garnered so much worldwide attention today.

SurveyGold Onlines Services Status Is Now Available

3/3/2014

SurveyGold Online Services is set of secure web services that enable the online features of the SurveyGold solution.

We now provide independently monitored service uptime information that reflects the current and recent operational status of our secure web services. Server status is checked continually every five minutes.

View SurveyGold Online Services Status

Privacy Policy Update: SurveyGold PCI Compliance Statement

1/24/2014

As a reflection of our commitment to protecting the data you entrust to our SurveyGold survey solution, all of our websites comply with PCI Security Standards. Rigorous PCI compliance scans are performed once every three months by a third-party and the results of their findings are described in a SurveyGold PCI Compliance Attestation.

SurveyGold PCI Compliance Attestation

A Word About Sacred Trust

New and Improved User Guide

10/29/2013

An all-new SurveyGold User Guide is now available online. The entire contents of the user guide is searchable via the website search tool. The new user guide features updated screen shots, updated contents, links to video tutorials and more.

View the SurveyGold User Guide

Software Update: Improvements to Data Collection

9/12/2013

We just added an improvement to the Update Activity action in the Home tab. SurveyGold would occasionally display an error message saying it could not get or remove web survey response files from SurveyGold online services. This issue has been resolved. Oh happy day! :-)

A Word about Data Privacy, Data Ownership and Sacred Trust

12/19/2012

In light of the recent news and uproar surrounding Instagram's updated terms of service describing their ability to sell photographs that are stored by users on their website, I thought it would be prudent and timely to remind you, our SurveyGold customers, of our position regarding the surveys and survey data that you collect, manage and track through the SurveyGold application and the surveygold.com, surveygoldplus.com and surveygoldcloud.com websites.

Your online surveys and your online survey response data are processed by our websites and reside on our websites. However, your online surveys and your online survey responses belong to you. They do not belong to us. We are stewards of your data and nothing more. This means that the entire SurveyGold solution exists to serve your needs and not to serve our needs.
We do not use your data for our business purposes. We proactively protect your survey and online survey response data via encryption and other measures. We do not scour your data looking for self-serving bits of information. We do not give anyone access to your data, unless required by law...which has never happened since opening our doors in 1999.
We do not perform any other business activity with your online survey responses data other than making it available to you. We will never sell or provide your data to anyone or any institution without your knowledge and consent or, again, as required by law. We say so formally in our published privacy policy.
As a reflection of our commitment to protecting the data you entrust to our SurveyGold survey solution, all of our websites are routinely scanned by an independent compliance organization and are attested to be compliant with PCI Security Standards.

My intention in making this statement is not to stir up a hornet's nest of inquiry and suspicion. Rather, my intention it so assure our SurveyGold users around the world that we consider it a sacred trust to process and store your online surveys and survey response data. We will never, ever, ever violate that trust. This is the very foundation of our SurveyGold brand promise to you.

Sincerely,
Chuck Boudreau
Founder, Golden Hills Software, Inc.
Makers of SurveyGold

Privacy Seals

How Secure Are Your Web Responses?

SurveyGold Privacy Policy

PCI Compliance Attestation

How Secure Are Your Web Survey Responses?

11/30/2012

You've created a web survey form using SurveyGold. You've distributed it to your respondents and they are filling out the form in droves. Magically the web survey responses start flowing into your SurveyGold application. All seems well until a thought crosses your mind, "Are my web survey responses being processed securely?"

It's a legitimate question and this article unpacks the details regarding the security of your SurveyGold web survey responses.

Overview: How Web Surveys Work

Before getting into the details of web survey security, it's probably a good idea to review just how your web survey responses are processed. The SurveyGold application is a workstation-based survey authoring and data collection solution. It provides the ability for you to create a web survey form that can be placed on your web site or, more commonly, on a website available our online service.

What the Respondent Does: When a respondent submits responses to your web survey form, those web survey responses are sent securely from the respondent's web browser across the Internet and recorded on the surveygold.com website.

What You Do: Later, when you perform the Update Activity action in your SurveyGold application, those web survey responses are moved securely from the surveygold.com website across the Internet to the SurveyGold application that resides on your computer.

When we say "web survey responses are sent securely" we mean it. Responses are sent across the Internet using Transport Layer Security (TLS), the leading Internet encryption technology.

A pictorial overview of web survey form processing is available here.

Pictorial Overview of Web Survey Form Processing

Why Our Online Service Processes Web Survey Responses

The SurveyGold Online Services platform on the Internet is the behind-the-scenes hub in our web survey processing solution. In contrast to the majority of other web survey solutions, one distinctive aspect of SurveyGold is that it delivers web survey responses to an application on your computer. Here is why our solution is designed this way:

It makes it feasible to deploy a web survey solution in an uncomplicated way that does not require information technology staff involvement. The SurveyGold solution is hassle free.
It would not be possible to provide such an affordable survey solution without our online service as the lynchpin because it avoids the associated costs of installing expensive web server components and database components on your website.

Encrypted Web Survey Responses Have a Secure Stay on Our Online Service

Protecting the privacy of web survey responses submitted via our online service is our highest value. Our servers are actively tested by a third-party for PCI compliance. Web survey responses are encrypted while they are stored on the surveygold.com website. Nothing is done with the responses other than staging them transiently while they await delivery to the SurveyGold application on your computer. As they are downloaded to your computer, they are moved to an archival location on our online service website to serve as a backup and to provide you the ability to share survey responses in real-time with other SurveyGold users via the Shared Responses feature.

No Questions, Only Responses are Recorded on Our Online Service

By the way, the web survey responses that are recorded on surveygold.com are completely encrypted when they come to rest and contain just one thing: responses. There is no contextual question data recorded on our online service.

This is by design so that the only place that responses are correlated to their associated questions is when they responses are downloaded via SurveyGold application to the survey author's computer. Your web survey responses reside in your SurveyGold application database (which is an encrypted file on your computer) after you have collected them into your SurveyGold application. After the responses are downloaded to your computer, they are moved to an archival location on our online service website to serve as a backup and to provide you the ability to share survey responses in real-time with other SurveyGold users via the Shared Responses feature.

The Final Word: Our Privacy Policy

Golden Hills Software is commited to integrity and honoring the implicit fiduciary trust that our global customer base has come to rely upon. To that end, we have published a privacy policy which outlines how our website is run and how responses are managed and what specific measures we employ to protect response data across the entire SurveyGold solution (both the website and your application).

View Our Privacy Policy

View Our Website Notices

Data Privacy, Ownership and Sacred Trust

Welcome to the New SurveyGold Website

9/24/2012

Greetings,

You may have notices that we have completely overhauled our website. The new website reflects the fresh ideas we will be rolling out in upcoming maintenance releases of the SurveyGold application and online services.

We are going after several objectives with the redesign. Foremost amongst them is to make the layout more consistent and to make the content more accessible whether your are in front of a computer or on a mobile device.

If you want to keep up with what's going on with SurveyGold, I invite you to subscribe to this blog. I look forward to staying better connected with you all. We've got some exciting stuff in store for you. Stay tuned...

Cheers,
Chuck