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Whenever you complete a quiz, test, or assessment (collectively, "assessment") on Personality Assessor ("the website"), all of your responses to the questions ("your data") are collected and stored in a password-protected database. You may choose to create a Personality Assessor User Account ("account"). When you create an account, your name and email address ("account information") are collected. If you complete an assessment while signed into your account, your data will be linked to your account information in the website's password protected database. The website also records your Internet Protocol (IP) address and which internet browser you use.
Some assessments on the website are provided purely for entertainment and educational purposes. Other assessments are used in current scientific research. Whenever you complete an assessment on the website, your data are collected and stored indefinitely in a password-protected database. For some assessments, your data may be analyzed for academic research purposes. What this means is that your individual data will be averaged together with data from many other people, and psychological researchers will look for trends in the aggregate data. Scientific researchers are not interested in building a profile of you, personally. Rather, they are interested in understanding general principles about how people function. The aggregate data can be published in journals, presented at conferences, or used in other academic contexts.
The scientific researchers who operate Personality Assessor strongly support open science. This means that your individual data may be stripped of any personally-identifying information and uploaded to scientific data repositories where other scientists can access the data to verify and replicate findings that are published in journals. Importantly, when your individual data are uploaded to scientific data repositories, they are completely anonymous and cannot be linked to you personally in any way, shape, or form. This means that your name, email address, birthday, account information, IP address, and any text typed into free response fields in assessments will NEVER be posted to scientific data repositories or shared with non-academic third parties in any way. Your completely anonymous answers to the questionnaires, however, may be posted to scientific data repositories.
Any personal information that could be used to identify you (e.g., name, account details, email address, birthday, text typed into free-response fields in assessments) is always kept completely private. It is never shared with non-academic third parties, and it is never used for commercial purposes. Your confidentiality will be protected to the maximum extent allowable by law.
Your account information is used only for (a) authentication purposes (i.e., to allow you to log into your account), and (b) to allow you to share your the results of your assessments with friends, if desired (see Section 6 below). Your account information and IP address are never shared with non-academic third parties and are never used for commercial purposes. Your IP address is used primarily to help the website identify duplicate responses on the assessments. Information about which internet browser you use is used primarily to help with troubleshooting any bugs/issues should you contact our technical support.
Before completing an assessment on the website, you will be provided with a consent page. The consent page will inform you that your data will be collected for academic research purposes. In order to begin an assessment, you must check a box or click a button to indicate that you explicitly consent to allow your data to be collected, analyzed for academic research purposes, and posted in anonymized form to scientific data repositories as described in Section 2a above.
However, when completing assessments, you may choose to skip any questions that you do not wish to answer and/or for which you do not wish to have your responses collected and analyzed for academic research purposes. Any questions that you voluntarily choose to answer will be collected and analyzed for academic research purposes as described in Section 2a above.
When you complete an assessment on the website, you will be provided with a results page that summarizes some of your data. These results pages will persist for a limited time on the website's servers. You will be provided with a randomly generated link (URL) to your results page. You may choose to share the link to your results with others, if you so desire. However, sharing your results is never compulsory. The results pages contain no personally identifying information, and have randomly generated URLs to make them nearly impossible to access unless others know the URL, which is provided by the website to you only.
Once you choose to share your results link with others, please be aware that the website has no way of controlling how others use, forward, or repost the link to your results.
The results pages for many assessments contain a comments section. Please note that comments appear on all results pages for particular assessments. Thus, if you choose to comment on your results page, your comment will be visible to anyone who completes the same assessment.
You may choose to create an account. When you create an account, you can supply basic account information including your name and email address. As described in Section 2b above, your account information is never shared with non-academic third parties and it is never used for commercial purposes. Your email address may be used to send you promotional material from the website or to send you reminders to complete multi-part assessments that you have started. You may choose whether to receive email communication from the website by visiting your account settings page on the website.
Please be aware that your account information is used to help other individuals with accounts ("other users") find you and add you as a friend on the website ("friend"; see Section 6 below). Specifically, other users may use the website's friend search function to search for your email address. Other users who search for your email address will be informed of (a) whether an account exists with your email address and (b) the name associated with your account.
As outlined in Section 1 above, when you complete an assessment while logged into your account, your data will be saved to your account. This means that your account information is linked to your data in the website's password-protected database. This is primarily for your benefit, so that you may review the results of past assessments. When scientific researchers analyze your data for scientific purposes (see Section 2a above), your account information is not linked to your data. This means that the scientists analyzing your data do not see your name, email address, or other account information.
You may choose to delete the results of any assessment, or even to delete your entire account at any time. If you delete the results of any assessment, or delete your entire account, any data associated with that assessment and/or your account will be permanently disassociated from your account. However, your data will be retained without any personally identifying information and used for academic research purposes as described above. What this means is that all of your data will be permanently stored. However, if you delete your account, your name and email address will no longer be associated with your data in the website's password-protected database.
Please note that when you log into your account, the website places a cookie on your computer. A cookie is a small text-file used to keep you logged in or logged out of the website. The website does not collect any other information from your computer, except as described in Section 1 above.
Using your account, you may add other people as friends. Adding friends is completely optional. By default, the results of your assessments are shared with your friends. You may change this default behavior by visiting your account settings page. Your name and email address, as listed on your account, are also shared with your friends.
Using settings in your account, you may choose to share the results of your assessments with "no one," "only my friends," or "everyone." If you choose to share your results with "everyone," anyone with an account can see the results of your assessments if they add you to THEIR friend list (i.e., no action is required on your part for other people to be able to see your results pages). If you choose to share your results with "only my friends," then ONLY individuals on YOUR friend list will be able to see your results. If you choose to share your results with "no one," then ONLY you will be able to see your results. Please note, the results of your assessments will appear in the news feeds of individuals who are allowed to see your results. Further note that your sharing settings only affect whether your friends can see your results pages or not. Irrespective of your sharing settings, your responses will be used for academic research purposes as described in Section 2a above.
Personality Assessor shares no information with non-academic third-parties.
Due to privacy and tracking concerns, as of July 2021, Personality Assessor no longer allows users to sign in with Facebook and/or connect their Facebook profiles to their accounts. If you originally created your account with Facebook, you may use the password reset feature to create a Personality Assessor password which will allow you to sign into your existing account using Personality Assessor's sign-in forms.
Personality Assessor shares no information with Facebook or any other third-party service. Personality Assessor also no longer requests any information about you whatsoever from Facebook or any other third-party service.
As of September 2023, all third-party plugins and trackers (e.g., from Google, Facebook [e.g., "Like" buttons or comment fields], or any other company) have been disabled on Personality Assessor. Thus, your traffic on our website is shared with absolutely no other non-academic third parties.