Your details registered with Saros

Saros will NEVER or sell your personal details to any other company or individual. In providing subjects for research groups to our market research agency clients, Saros conducts all the administration of the group and no identifying data is revealed to the agency or their client (only your name is used within the group). If in certain studies contact information needs to be passed on to the commissioning client (for example if they need to call you or email instructions to brief you directly) this will be indicated at the point of recruitment and your specific consent requested - we will also make it completely clear at this point the precise purpose of the contact and the agreement we have made with the organization involved (eg not to retain your contact details or to contact you again after the project).

Paper files containing identifying data are regarded as confidential and subject to good practice in secure handling – paper records are NOT retained once projects are concluded, and waste paper containing identifying data is shredded on the premises prior to recycling (or may in larger quantities be disposed of via a licenced secure destruction service with full audit trail).

Under the Data Protection Act you have a right of access to the personal information we hold about you. If you wish to exercise this, and be sent copies of every piece of information we have (e.g. your database entry and all correspondence) then please request it in writing, along with a £10 administration fee – please make cheques payable to Saros Research Ltd.  If you wish to check your information informally, such as to make sure we have your correct address, you may do this at any time by email or phone to 020 8481 7160 (if you call we may ask you some identifying questions on the phone to check you are who you say you are).

What sort of information does Saros hold,
and how is it used?

The information Saros collects about people is shown on the questionnaire that everybody needs to complete to register on the database. Some of the questions might seem quite personal, such as age and income bracket, but these are vital in selecting people to participate in research. Basically keeping this data saves us contacting you needlessly often about projects for which you are not eligible.

This information is held on our dedicated server, which is located at our head office in London . The only other information stored with each person's name are details of research invited to/participated in – this is to maintain the quality standard above, to make sure we are not involving the same person too often, or for too similar a subject – and how an individual came to register with Saros (eg which advert was responded to initially)

Data about your ethnicity is used statistically (for diversity monitoring purposes) and to try and achieve balance within groups. It is also used in the small proportion of projects in which targeting by ethnicity is a valid research criteria (an example would be if we were commissioned to locate people to test a product created for afro hair care).

If you have stated that you have a disability this information may be used on an individual basis to meet your needs, for example we may need to contact you and ask if you require any special help to attend and participate in a group. For the same reason disability information may have to be disclosed to the client and/or venue.  Occasionally we may have social or technology research where a specific disability is actually a recruitment criteria.