Online survey privacy notice

The Financial Ombudsman Service is the data controller for any personal information that we process unless we state otherwise. If you wish to contact us, you can find details on our website.

Personal information means information that is about you – for example, your name and date of birth. With your consent, we process (eg collect, record, share) your personal information to collect feedback from our consumers on their experience of using the service. We use that feedback to help improve the way we work.

With your consent, we also process special category data such as information about your religion or belief, physical or mental health, racial or ethnic origins, gender identity or sexual orientation. We process this special category of personal data to ensure that our service is fair for everyone – and that people from all backgrounds know about us and can use our service if they need to.

We may also contact you for additional feedback about your experience with the service – but only if you give your consent.

We survey people at different points throughout our process and any feedback you give within these surveys will remain confidential within the service.

The answers to all of the questions on the survey are voluntary, but the more information that you are willing to provide, the better we will be able to make improvements to the service and ensure that the service can be accessed equally by everyone. The answers you provide, including those in free text boxes may be shared with relevant employees to assist in improving the service that we provide. Special category data is only seen by a small separate research team who will analyse the results, anonymise them and only share this information on an aggregated basis.

We keep your personal information only for as long as we need to. We will retain your personal information on our survey platform for three years from the date of the survey. After this period, we will securely destroy your personal information in accordance with our retention schedule up to a maximum of 6 years.

We take appropriate steps to safeguard your data.

The information collected is held on the secure survey platform QuestionPro.  Any data collected by QuestionPro for us is stored on servers in the European Economic Area (EEA). A link to their privacy notice can be found here.  Question Pro is required to keep your personal data safe and secure. They have agreed to treat the information confidentially and are not permitted to use your information for their own purposes.

Our main legal basis for processing your personal information here is that you have given us your consent. Where you have provided consent, you can withdraw it at any time.

You have a number of rights under data protection laws which we have set out below. These rights don’t always apply and sometimes there are exemptions we can and might apply:

Right to access – you have the right to ask us for a copy of your personal information.

Right to rectification – you have the right to ask us to correct personal information that you think is wrong and to complete personal information that you think is incomplete.

Right to erasure – you have the right to ask us to erase your personal information.

Right to restriction of processing – you have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information.

Right to data portability – you have the right to ask that we transfer the information you have given us to another organisation or to give it to you.

Normally, you won’t have to pay anything to exercise these rights and we will have one month to respond to you. If you wish to make a request, please contact us at [email protected].