It's a legitimate question and this article unpacks the details regarding the security of your SurveyGold online survey responses.
Overview: How Online Surveys Work
What the Respondent Does: When a respondent submits responses to your online survey form, those online 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 online 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 "online 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 online survey form processing is available here.
Why Our Online Service Processes Online Survey Responses
- It makes it feasible to deploy an online 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 Online Survey Responses Have a Secure Stay on Our Online Service
No Questions, Only Responses are 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 online 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.