Perl Survey: Privacy Statement

We're not lawyers, so we'll try to put this in plain English.

How we use your email address

When you sign up for the Perl Survey, we'll need your email address. This is used for the following purposes:

  1. As an identifier, so we can tell you've already taken the survey.
  2. To reply to you if you provide comments/suggestions and we want to discuss them
  3. At your request, to send you notification when the survey's results are ready.

Once the survey is complete and we've notified anyone who wanted to know about the results, we'll delete your email address and never use it again. We definitely won't hand the email addresses out to anyone who asks for them, not even if they pay us.

How we're releasing the results

Many surveys -- from the US Census on down -- only ever release aggregate data, to protect your privacy. Here at the Perl Survey, however, we will be releasing the full data set as a downloadable CSV file, in order to allow anyone to analyse it in any way they want.

The CSV file we release will not contain your email address; as mentioned above, we only use it for initial registration and to let you know when the results are ready.

However, even without your email address, anyone with the right sort of clues may be able to infer which record refers to you if you have unusual data. For instance, in countries where there are few Perl programmers, it may be easy to identify those few in the data set. Or, if you have an unusually high number of CPAN modules, people might be able to identify you by that.

Very little of the data we collect is of a sensitive nature. The most sensitive is your income, and for that reason we've given you the option to say "none of your business!" to that question. If you worry about anyone getting hold of the other data we collect -- such as your country of birth, age, or what programming languages you know -- then we can only advise you not to take this survey.

Any other questions?

Please feel free to contact info@perlsurvey.org if you have any questions or issues.