- Who is running this survey, and why
- This survey is run by a student research team as part of the YATRA project, an academic effort to build a travel recommendation engine. The responses are used to understand how travellers weigh price, location, quality and convenience against each other, and to evaluate whether personalised recommendations work better than fixed ones.
- Taking part is voluntary
- You can stop at any time by closing the page. Nothing is submitted until you press Submit on the review screen. You do not need an account, and you are never asked to identify yourself.
- What is collected
- Your answers, and some technical context about how the survey was used: how long you spent on each question, how often you changed an answer, whether you moved backwards through the survey, whether you were on a phone, tablet or computer, your screen size, your browser language, and the site that linked you here if there was one. This context is what lets us tell a carefully considered response from a rushed one.
- Making sure the survey is only taken once
- Because responses are rewarded, we have to be able to tell a new respondent from someone returning for a second payment. To do that we record your network (IP) address, set a cookie identifying your browser, and note a few ordinary properties your browser reports anyway — your screen size, time zone, language and the like. These are used for that one purpose. They are kept in a separate table that no analysis of the survey results ever reads, your network address is erased once it is no longer needed for that check, and we do not use any of it to work out where you are or to track you anywhere else.
- What is never collected
- We do not ask for and do not store your name, postal address, date of birth, government ID, or any financial information beyond the UPI id you give us if you want paying — a UPI id lets us send money to you and nothing more. We never request access to your location, contacts, camera, microphone or clipboard, and we do not record your keystrokes. We do not set advertising or tracking cookies, and we do not use the rendering or audio fingerprinting techniques that identify a browser across other websites. Free-text answers are stored only when you submit them — nothing is captured as you type.
- Payment, and what it means for your anonymity
- Payment is worked out from the quality of a response, so a payment has to be matched to the response it is for. We do that with a random reference code: the code is stored against your answers, and separately against your UPI id. Neither record contains both. Nobody reading the research data can see a UPI id, and nobody reading the payment list can see any answers — matching the two requires deliberately joining them on that code, which is done once, to produce a list of payments to send. Once payments have gone out, the codes and the UPI ids are deleted, and what remains cannot be traced back to you. Giving a UPI id is optional and your response counts without one.
- How the data is stored and used
- Responses are stored in a database accessible only to the research team, and are reported in aggregate — in a research paper, a project report, and internal analysis. No individual response is published. The research data itself carries no name or contact detail, and the technical records used to prevent repeat submissions are kept apart from it, so the results can be analysed and published without reference to who gave them.
- Data quality checks
- The survey includes a small number of attention checks, and we compare what respondents say against the choices they make. This is used to label responses for analysis. No response is ever deleted or discarded on the basis of these checks.