Trust is our credo
Our colleagues have been working on the applied research field for over twenty years.
We understand deeply how trust forms the core of everything we do:
- Our clients can only make the right decisions, if they can trust the insights we present.
- We can only present the right insights, if we can trust the data we use,
if we can trust the honesty of the opinions we gather. - The people we interview or survey need to be able to fully trust that we treat their opinion and responses with the utmost discretion, anonymity – so they can be honest without fear of disadvantages of any kind.
- In the end, our very aim is to help our clients and their partners (audience, employees, or business relations) to build trusted and mutually beneficial relationships.
It is everyone’s interest in this circle, that trust is never broken; as trust can only be lost once.
In all our twenty years working on this field, we have been treating the question of trust and integrity with the upmost priority and seriousness.
We pride ourselves to have always been refusing all and any requests that would have compromised anonymity or the interests of either our clients or their partners – even if maintaining such integrity required us to decline revenues or take significant financial losses.
The coming of the GDPR did not change our attitude to the seriousness of how we treat anonymity and confidentiality of the opinions and the data we handle. It did not need to.
Your rights regarding your personal data
Our primary approach to handling any personal data is focusing on maintaining the absolute minimal amount of personal information that is necessary to perform our services. Personal data is stored in an encrypted, physically and logically separated form in a secure location – away from any responses to any of our surveys, thereby maintaining the confidentiality of our respondents, even in the case of a malicious attack against our servers.
If we are handling any of your personal data, you are entitled to:
- Request insight into the personal data we maintain about you and the purposes of processing that information.
- Request to delete/update/transfer the personal data that we maintain about you.
In case you would like to request insight into or deletion/update/transfer of your personal data, please send an initial request via e-mail to privacy (at) avrconsulting.nl. Our colleagues will get in touch with you via a secure communication channel and guide you through this process.
The below Privacy Statement provides further, detailed information about your rights.
Privacy Statement
- Who we are?
AvR Consulting is a boutique, small-scale organization offering customized research, surveying and analytic services.
We are established in the Netherlands, in the Amsterdam area (KVK: 60646128).
Due to the nature and scale of our activities and to protect the data we handle and our employees we maintain no public visiting address at this point. If you need further information, we are happy to assist you. Feel free to contact us by email: info (at) avrconsulting.nl.
Data-protection officer: privacy (at) avrconsulting.nl - What Personal Information do we collect and process?
The below list covers the type of personal information we may collect and process about you in various engagements with our organization. The list also provides details about the purpose and use of such information as well as its related data-retention policies.- Our website: avrconsulting.nl
Our website collects no personal information about its visitors. It only serves to inform our clients or their partners about our services, our contact details, and about our privacy policy.
If you decide to contact us via any of the manners stated on our website, we may internally store the contact information you share with us (particularly the email address you write from or the phone number you are calling from) for future reference.
The purpose of this is to ensure we can continue to reach you during and after our initial engagement. Such contact details may be retained indefinitely. Such contact details are always kept confidential, and are never used for other purposes or sold to 3rd parties. - Our surveys, interviews
If you fill out a survey or participate in an interview in any of our research projects, we may collect and process certain personal information about you. These may include your name, contact details (such as email or phone number), country of residence, workplace or job title. In addition, we may ask certain demographic details from you during the surveys or interviews, which you may provide or decline on a completely voluntary basis.
The exact list of direct or indirect personal information we collect varies from project to project. Our general policy is to collect only the minimal amount of information that is necessary for the successful delivery of the related research project.
At the beginning of any interview or survey you are provided a detailed list of what type of direct or indirect personal information we would collect and maintain about you. This information provided in the form of a privacy notice. By consenting to this form, you accept our handling of your personal data.
The purpose of collecting certain direct or indirect personal information is always closely connected to the actual research project you participate in. Contact details are used to make contact with you for the survey or interviews (e.g. invitation or reminder emails sent to your email address). Indirect Personal Data, such as demographic information is used for statistical and research purposes only.
We take extreme precaution to ensure your responses to either of our surveys or interviews are always treated with the upmost confidentiality, and any reports produced by us will always only contain statistically processed and summarized information, where individual responses are not visible. We are also applying strong encryption, pseudonymization and data-separation policies to ensure your responses can not be connected to your personal data.
Data retention policy may differ from project to project, in line with legal and archiving requirements or business continuity purposes. You are informed about the relevant data-retention policy for the project you participate in in the privacy notice document you consent to before engaging in the survey or interview. - About our partners
If you are one of our business partners, or you contact us in a business relation, we may collect and retain certain information about you and/or your organization. This may include your name, contact details, workplace, job title, billing details of your organization (including address, tax number or registration number). It may also include a history of previous engagements and conversations.
Such information is used for the purpose of maintaining the business relationship between you and our organization. Such data may be retained indefinitely. - Analytics, or secondary data-processing service
AvR Consulting offers analytic services to data controllers in which relation it operates in a data-processing role. Should such engagements include processing of personal data; a separate data-processing and confidentiality agreement is always contracted between AvR Consulting and the data controller – prior to engaging in said data-processing activity.
Such engagements always strictly regulate all matters of handling such personal data (including its purpose, its secure storage and retention) and usually takes place within the data controller’s physical and technological environment. (i.e. no personal data leaves the data controller’s computer system.)
Should you believe AvR Consulting is processing your personal data in such a relationship, please refer to the data controller as your primary source of information about your rights to your personal data. AvR Consulting cannot directly establish contact with you in such cases.
- Our website: avrconsulting.nl
- How do we store and protect personal data?
Personal data is stored in a physically separated and cryptographically secured from, away from other sensitive information such as responses to our surveys. To enhance the security and confidentiality of your responses, we are exclusively using pseudonymized identifiers (such as specially generated random codes) from which the original personal data can not be deciphered.
Access to personal data is strictly restricted to personnel designated to work with such personal data. It is covered under multiple layers of high-complexity cryptographic protective measures – to protect it from any form of unauthorized access. - Your Rights
You have the right to enquire whether we store any personal information about you. To do so, please email us at privacy (at) avrconsulting.nl. Our colleagues will contact you via a secure communication channel and guide you through the process. Please note, that in order to protect the identity of the people whose personal information we handle, you may be required to provide proof of your identity to ensure you are enquiring about your own and only your own information.
If we do in fact store personal information about you, you have the right to: ask what information we store about you, for what purpose, on what legal basis and for how long. You may also request us to update your personal information or erase your personal information. In case your personal information is stored in a long-term archive, it is possible that your request would be honored by marking your information as “to be erased or to be updated”; and would only be erased or updated at the next cycle of updating long-term archives. It is also possible that we need to comply with legal requirements to keep and protect archive databases; in which case we can not honor a request to erase or update your personal data. You will be provided with up-to-date information on the situation applicable to your personal data upon request.
You also have the right to request us to transfer your personal data to another entity. In such cases the other entity may be required to provide proof of their ability to handle the data with the required integrity, confidentiality and security measures. Should they fail to be able to demonstrate such ability we may advise you against such transfer, or in extreme cases may be legally required to refuse such transfer in order to comply with data security or confidentiality requirements.
The above mentioned services (enquiring about personal data or request to update, erase or transfer personal data) are provided free of charge for any natural person once per calendar year. Subsequent requests from the same person about the same data within the same calendar year may require a nominal fee to be paid to cover the administrative costs of handling of such data. Should you request the above service more than once within a calendar year, you would be provided information about the related costs prior to fulfilling your request. You would not be charged unless you specifically and directly request such a service.
In case you are dissatisfied with the way we handle your personal data or your requests about your personal data, we ask you to inform us directly at privacy (at) avrconsulting.nl, allowing us to try our best rectifying your concern. Should we fail to be able to do so, you have the right to bring a complaint to the relevant data protection authority in your jurisdiction about your concerns on how we are processing your personal information. For more information on how to lodge a complaint, please contact your local data protection authority. - Cookie and IP Address Policy
All privacy-conscious individuals are advised to set their browser’s cookie policy to automatically erase all cookies regularly, upon every closure of the browser for example. We advise our clients and visitors to check their browser’s settings and do the same. You may want to whitelist certain sites whose cookies you regularly benefit from – this is entirely a question of personal preference.
Our main website or survey websites may use session cookies, which enable your interaction with the website while you are using it. These cookies are serving solely a technical purpose to enable your interaction with our website. They are usually expired immediately after you close your browser, or in a few cases within 1 day.
AvR Consulting does not collect any personal information about you via placing or analyzing the cookies on your device.
Your IP Address may be recorded for security and fraud-detection purposes when you are visiting our website or filling in one of our surveys. Expiration date of this data may vary from project to project and we advise you to check the actual privacy notice for the information relevant to the project you participate in, before consenting to such form. - Personal Data of Children
AvR Consulting does not knowingly collect or process any data from persons under the age of 16 in either direct or indirect form. - Automated Decision Making / Profiling
AvR Consulting may apply analytic techniques such as clustering of survey participants, or evaluation of individuals (for example in feedback surveys) – depending on the project characteristics and requirements.
Our strong social commitment requires that such analyses are always serving a positive purpose, and are always executed in an absolutely fair, comparable, reliable and transparent manner. We categorically refuse any request for any assignment which would aim to misuse, exploit, spam or cause any harm to any individual as a result of our analyses. - Changes to our Privacy Policy
AvR Consulting retains the right to make changes to its Privacy Policy.
The above Privacy Policy has been in effect since 5. September, 2019