Privacy policy
Populiva is a marketplace where researchers run online studies with verified, fairly paid participants. This page explains what we collect, why, who sees it, and how we protect it.
What we collect
Researchers: your name, email, institution, field, role, how many studies you run each year, whether you've used MTurk, the platform you use now, and anything you add in the notes.
Participants: your email, ZIP code, year of birth, sex, education, preferred language, and how you heard about us. Race or ethnicity and political party only if you choose to answer.
Participants with an account: a scrambled fingerprint of your browser and scrambled IP addresses, used only to stop duplicate accounts and fraud; your welcome-study answers; and how long it took and how many times you pasted text or switched away from the page (counts only, never what you typed).
Optional profile questions you choose to answer, about work, household, health, languages and background, technology, and civic life. All answers are encrypted. Researchers can choose who sees a study based on them, but never see your answers unless a study tells you which ones it shares before you start.
Participants who connect PayPal: your PayPal account ID, the email on the account, and whether PayPal has verified it, so we can pay you and keep to one PayPal account per person.
Participants paid $1,500 or more in a year: your legal name, address, and taxpayer ID (SSN or ITIN) from your W-9, used only for IRS tax reporting.
During studies: when you took part, how long you took, the researcher's review, and your earnings. If a researcher's survey includes our quality snippet, also counts from the survey pages: time on each page, how often you switched away, pasted, or copied, how fast you typed, pointer activity, whether your browser reports that automation software controls it, and whether a hidden check meant for AI agents was triggered. Never your answers, what you typed, or screenshots.
Messages you exchange with researchers, stored encrypted. Researchers see only your PARTICIPANT_ID; our team reads a message only if it's reported.
For everyone: the language of the page you used, the campaign tags (UTM) of the link you followed, any referral code, and when you agreed to this policy and confirmed your email.
Why we collect it
To confirm your email and contact you when we're ready for you.
To build a participant pool that reflects the people of the United States, so research includes people like you. We count sign-ups by broad groups (age band, sex, race or ethnicity, and education) to see who we're still missing.
To decide which research labs to work with first.
To match you with studies, pay you, meet US tax rules, and stop fraud.
To give researchers evidence about the quality of each response, and signed reports that describe their sample in aggregate.
How we protect it
Race or ethnicity, political party, and your W-9 details (legal name, address, and taxpayer ID) are encrypted in our database. We keep personal details out of our logs.
We don't sell your data, and we don't share participants' contact details with researchers. Researchers see a pseudonymous ID that's different for each lab, the screening answers their study used, and each response's quality evidence (such as your verification level and any quality flags). Provenance reports contain only totals, never IDs.
We use PostHog to count events, such as how many people sign up, and to find errors on the site. It never receives your name, email address, IP address, or your answers.
Deleting your sign-up
Every email we send includes a link that deletes your sign-up straight away. You can also ask us to delete your data at any time. We keep payment and tax records (including W-9s) for as long as the law requires, even after you leave.
Contact
Questions about your data, or want us to delete it? Email us: