Data Ethics & Compliance

Surdatics only produces consented data.

• Every respondent sees what a study is for, and its reward if it has one, before they answer.
• Nobody is enrolled without agreeing: no tracking, no bought contact lists.
• Consent is specific: answering a study is not agreeing to verification, and neither is agreeing to marketing.
• Consent to resale, to verification and to messages can be withdrawn at any time, and withdrawing stops what it covered from then on.

• Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 (NDPA) — our home regime, supervised by the Nigeria Data Protection Commission.
• EU / UK GDPR — where a respondent is in the EEA or UK. Consent for the biometric data Surdatics Verify uses is asked for separately and explicitly (Article 9).
• ePrivacy / PECR — cookies and electronic communications.
• Research ethics — informed consent, the right to stop part-way, no deception about purpose, and a fair reward where a study offers one.

We do not claim certifications we have not earned. When we are independently audited, this page will name the standard, the auditor and the date.

Every answer is hashed the moment it arrives and anchored on the blockchain, and each study's dataset again, each person's reward record included, so a buyer can confirm the data is the one that was collected, unchanged, and how the people in it were rewarded. Only the SHA-256 hash goes on the blockchain, never the answers or anyone's personal details.

The Surdatics Data Marketplace labels them distinctly everywhere they appear:

• Collected on Surdatics. Gathered here, with consent, from the people who answered. We stand behind how it was obtained.
• Brought by the seller. Collected elsewhere. The seller warrants its lawful origin, and the listing says we did not witness its collection.

A buyer always knows which they are buying before they buy.

Every dataset is checked for direct identifiers before it is listed. A dataset collected on Surdatics leaves them out, with a row id of its own in place of anyone's address, so one person cannot be followed from one dataset to another. A dataset brought by a seller where we find them is refused.

Anonymisation is not absolute. Small datasets with rare combinations are flagged, re-identification is barred by contract, and anyone who attempts it loses access.

• We do not scrape people’s data from the web, and we do not buy scraped data.
• We do not train models on your personal data.
• We do not sell personal data. Datasets on the Surdatics Data Marketplace are anonymised.
• Surdatics AI is our automated assistant, and it is never presented as a person. It helps write studies and reports, translates, and writes out recorded answers.
• People approve or reject answers. Automated checks can refuse or hold something, and a person looks at it when asked.

A buyer may train models on anonymised data where their licence says so. Nothing that could identify a respondent is ever sold.

• The reward is shown before a respondent starts, and it is never lowered once they begin.
• Rewards are funded before a study goes live.
• A rejected answer can be disputed, and someone other than the researcher reviews it.
• Cash-out is opening country by country, and we offer a method only when it can actually send the money.

If you believe a dataset was collected improperly, that a listing contains personal data, or that someone has attempted re-identification, tell us at info@surdatics.com. We investigate every report and suspend a listing while we do.

Security issues go to the same address, info@surdatics.com. We will not pursue anyone who reports a genuine vulnerability to us in good faith and gives us reasonable time to fix it.