Privacy Policy

We hold the following about a person who uses Surdatics:

• Account details — name, email address, password (stored hashed, never in readable form), and the organisation you belong to.
• Profile details — date of birth, gender, city, address, profession and phone number, where you provide them. These are optional, and they exist so surveys can be targeted to the right people.
• Survey responses — the answers you give, and which survey and question each belongs to.
• Video and audio — where a survey asks for a video response, the recording and its transcript, and the sentiment and themes derived from it.
• Biometric data — if you complete identity verification, a mathematical representation of your face (a "face encoding"). This is special-category data and is treated separately in section 4.
• Payment details — your wallet balance, payout destination (bank account or wallet address), and a record of every credit and debit.
• Technical data — IP address, device and browser information, and timestamps, kept for security and fraud prevention.

We do not collect anything “just in case”. Each category has a purpose and a lawful basis under the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 and the EU/UK GDPR where those apply to you:

• To run your account — performance of our contract with you.
• To match you to surveys — your consent, given when you complete your profile. Leaving a field blank simply means fewer surveys match you.
• To pay you — performance of contract, and our legal obligation to keep financial records.
• To verify you are a real, unique person — your explicit consent (see section 4).
• To prevent fraud and protect the platform — our legitimate interest in not paying out twice for the same work, or to someone impersonating another person.

Surdatics offers proof-of-personhood: a liveness check that confirms a real, unique human is behind a response. This matters because researchers are paying for genuine human answers, and because a platform that cannot tell one person from a hundred bot accounts is not worth buying data from.

To do it we compute a face encoding — a set of numbers derived from your face. It is special-category data under GDPR Article 9 and sensitive personal data under the NDPA, so:

• We ask for your explicit consent before any verification, separately from the rest of your account.
• Verification is optional. You can use Surdatics without it, though some surveys require verified respondents and will not be offered to you.
• We store the encoding, not a photograph, and it cannot be reversed into a picture of your face.
• It is never sold, never included in any dataset sold on the marketplace, and never shared with researchers.
• You can withdraw consent and have the encoding deleted at any time, which removes your verified status.

The researcher who commissioned a survey sees the answers to it. What they do not see is who gave them, unless you were told otherwise before you started and agreed to it.

• Researchers see responses and the demographic fields their survey targeted — never your name, email, phone number, address or face encoding.
• Dataset buyers receive anonymised data only. Direct identifiers are stripped before any dataset can be listed.
• Service providers — payment processors, cloud hosting, transcription. They act on our instructions and may not use your data for their own purposes.
• Nobody else. We do not sell your contact details, and we do not share data with advertisers.

“Anonymised” is a word that gets used loosely, so here is what we mean by it. Before a dataset can be listed for sale:

• Direct identifiers — name, email, phone, address, wallet address, account ID — are removed, not merely hidden behind a column setting.
• Free-text answers are scanned for identifiers a respondent may have typed into them, because an open question is where a real name most often ends up.
• Each response carries a per-dataset pseudonym rather than a stable platform identifier, so the same person cannot be tracked across datasets by a buyer who holds two of them.

We are honest about the limit: no anonymisation is absolute. A dataset with enough rare demographic detail can in principle narrow to an individual. Buyers are contractually barred from attempting re-identification, and doing so ends their access.

Every response carries a provenance record: what was asked, when it was answered, whether the respondent was verified, and whether and how much they were paid. A cryptographic digest of that record is anchored so it cannot be rewritten after the fact.

The digest is a fingerprint, not your data. Anchoring it publishes nothing about you and cannot be reversed into your answers. It exists so a buyer can prove a dataset was collected the way it claims, and so you can prove you were paid for it.

• Account details — while your account exists, then 30 days after you delete it.
• Survey responses — indefinitely in anonymised form, because a researcher has already paid for them and buyers rely on them. The link between a response and you is severed on deletion.
• Face encodings — until you withdraw consent, or 24 months after your last verification, whichever comes first.
• Financial records — 7 years, because tax law requires it.
• Video recordings — 12 months, unless the commissioning researcher agreed a shorter period with you.

These rights are yours under the NDPA and the GDPR. They are free to exercise and we answer within 30 days.

• See it — a copy of everything we hold about you.
• Correct it — fix anything wrong.
• Delete it — remove your account and sever your answers from you. Anonymised responses already sold cannot be recalled, and we will say so plainly rather than imply otherwise.
• Take it elsewhere — your data in a machine-readable format.
• Withdraw consent — for profiling, for verification, or for both, without losing access to the rest of the platform.
• Object — to any processing we do on the basis of legitimate interest.
• Complain — to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission, or to your own supervisory authority if you are in the EU or UK.

We use AI in three places: generating draft survey questions for researchers, transcribing and summarising video responses, and producing report drafts from results.

What we do not do matters more. We do not scrape. Every record on Surdatics comes from someone who was asked, agreed, and was paid. We do not buy scraped datasets, we do not accept them onto the marketplace, and we do not train models on your personal data or sell it to anyone who does.

No decision that affects you — whether a response is approved, whether you are paid — is made by an automated system alone without a route to human review.

• All traffic is encrypted in transit (TLS).
• Secrets, signing keys and payout credentials are encrypted at rest.
• Passwords are hashed and cannot be read by us or recovered.
• Access to production data is limited to named administrators and logged.

We do not claim certifications we do not hold. Where we are audited or certified in future, this page will say which standard and by whom, with a date.

Surdatics operates across more than one country, and our infrastructure and payment partners may process data outside your own. Where data leaves Nigeria, the EEA or the UK, we rely on the transfer mechanisms those laws provide, including standard contractual clauses with the provider concerned.

If we change anything that materially affects you, we will tell you by email and in the product before it takes effect, not quietly update this page and rely on you noticing.