Privacy Policy

Introduction

The objective of FMR Global Research is to carry out comprehensive Market Research involving Health Care Professionals, patients, and consumers. We are committed to safeguarding the privacy and personal data of our customers, respondents, and employees. Our practices comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) effective from 25 May 2018, as well as other relevant local and international regulations.

Context

The GDPR issued by the European Union refers to the protection of privacy rights of individuals, introducing tighter restrictions around consent, the right to be forgotten, the amount of personal data utilized, data access, and security. The protection of personal data is a top priority for FMR Global Research.

Compliance and Code of Conduct

FMR Global Research adheres to the ICC/ESOMAR International Code on Market, Opinion and Social Research and Data Analytics, and all current local regulations, particularly regarding the protection of respondents’ data. Additionally, FMR Global Research has adopted the Cybersecurity Code of Conduct with IT Security and Information Management policies to safeguard personal data.

Data Protection Mandate

Our mandate is to ensure that personal data is appropriately treated and protected. This includes:

• Anonymized Data and Access Security: Using anonymization techniques to protect respondents’ personal data and restrict access to fieldwork teams on a need-to-know basis. The same policy applies to customer-provided samples, online panelists, and offline respondents.
• Employee Data Access: Access to employees’ personal data is limited to relevant human resources staff.
• Encryption Solutions: Implementing encryption solutions on all employees’ laptops and databases containing sensitive categories of personal data.
• Partner and Supplier Compliance: Selecting partners based on their capacity to comply with data protection requirements. All partners must sign agreements including data protection clauses, and no supplier can transfer any personal data without appropriate safeguards and customer consent.

Data Transfers

Contractual measures are in place for cross-border data transfers. When data transfer is required to a country without adequate data protection, FMR Global Research ensures the use of EU Standard Contractual Clauses and appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect personal data.

Services and Data Processing

FMR Global Research undertakes the following actions as required:

• Recruitment of Health Care Professionals, patients, caregivers, and consumers.
• Conducting interviews face-to-face, in-studio, online, over the phone, or in-field.
• Providing simultaneous translation or voice-over.
• Compensating respondents.
• Transcribing or delivering collected information.
• Translating materials.
• Conducting consolidated data analysis.

FMR Global Research ensures that data delivered is anonymized and complies with GDPR requirements.

Data Protection Principles

The GDPR imposes significant compliance measures and safeguards. FMR Global Research adheres to the following six general privacy principles:

1. Lawfulness, Fairness, and Transparency: Personal data is processed lawfully, fairly, and transparently.
2. Purpose Limitation: Personal data is collected for specified, explicit, and legitimate purposes.
3. Data Minimization: Personal data processed is adequate, relevant, and limited to what is necessary.
4. Accuracy: Personal data is accurate and kept up to date.
5. Storage Limitation: Personal data is not kept longer than necessary.
6. Integrity and Confidentiality: Appropriate measures are in place to protect against unauthorized processing, loss, or damage.

Personal Data

Personal data under GDPR refers to information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person. This includes sensitive personal data such as health information, political opinions, and biometric data.

Anonymization and Pseudonymization

To protect respondent privacy, FMR Global Research anonymizes or pseudonymizes personal data early in the research cycle. This ensures that individuals cannot be identified from the data.

Data Subject Rights

Under GDPR, individuals have the following rights:

• Right to Access: Request access to their personal data.
• Right to Rectification: Request corrections to inaccurate or incomplete data.
• Right to Erasure: Request deletion of their data under certain conditions.
• Right to Restrict Processing: Request limitations on data processing.
• Right to Data Portability: Request their data in a structured, commonly used format.
• Right to Object: Object to data processing under specific circumstances.
• Right to Withdraw Consent: Withdraw consent for data processing at any time.

Data Security

FMR Global Research employs robust security measures, including:

• Physical Measures: Secure access controls, locked storage, and surveillance.
• Technological Measures: Encryption, firewalls, and secure passwords.
• Organizational Measures: Staff training, confidentiality agreements, and strict access controls.

In case of a data breach, we have established procedures to promptly address and mitigate the breach, including notifying affected individuals and relevant authorities if necessary.

Data Retention

Personal data is retained only as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes for which it was collected. Once the retention period expires, data is securely destroyed or anonymized.

Children’s Data

FMR Global Research does not knowingly collect data from children under 16 without parental consent. For projects involving minors, explicit consent from a parent or legal guardian is obtained and verified.

Photographs, Audio, and Video Recordings

Photographs, audio, and video recordings are considered personal data and are handled with the same level of protection. In public settings, clear signs will indicate observation, and permissions are obtained from identifiable individuals. Data from these recordings is retained for no longer than six months unless otherwise required by law.

Partner and Supplier Agreements

All FMR partners and suppliers must comply with the following:

• Services must be carried out in compliance with professional codes of conduct and legal requirements.
• Confidentiality of information provided by FMR must be maintained.
• Data protection measures must be implemented to safeguard personal data.
• Pharmacovigilance processes must be followed.

The General Data Protection Regulation issued by the European Union (“GDPR”) and effective 25 May, 2018, refers to the protection of the privacy rights of individuals (for example, tighter restrictions around consent, the right to be forgotten, the type of and amount of personal data that can be utilized, data access and security, etc.) beyond those protections that have already been in place for some time in the European Union and in many other countries around the world.

As such, the protection of personal data is a top priority.
FMR GLOBAL RESEARCH is compliant with the guidance and requirements of the professional code of conduct applicable to all registered market research companies (ICC/ESOMAR International Code on Market, Opinion and Social Research and Data Analytics) and all current existing local regulations, especially as far as the protection of respondents’ data is concerned.
In addition, FMR has adopted the Cyber security code of conduct with IT Security and Information Management policies to safeguard and protect the personal data of its customers, respondents, and employees.
Its mandate is:

• To ensure that personal data are appropriately treated and protected.
• Anonymized data and access security – For respondents, anonymization techniques are used to protect respondents’ personal data as part of its data collection operations so that access is restricted to its fieldwork teams in its operations units solely on a need-to-know basis.*
• The same policy applies to customer-provided samples, online panelists, and offline respondents.

*ICC/Esomar International Code on Market, Opinion and Social Research and Data Analytics (https://www.esomar.org/what-we-do/code-guidelines)
For our employees, access to employees’ personal data is strictly limited to the relevant staff in charge of human resources management.
FMR GLOBAL HEALTH implemented various encryption solutions, notably on all employees’ laptops and databases containing special (sensitive) categories of personal data, such as data concerning health, political opinions, etc.
For Partners or Suppliers, FMR GLOBAL HEALTH enforces procedures in order to select Partners processing personal data based on their capacity to comply with data protection requirements. This means that all Partners must sign an agreement including data protection clauses and that no supplier can transfer any personal data unless they agree to appropriate safeguards and obtain customer consent. Additionally, our Partners cannot subcontract part of the personal data processing services to sub-processors without prior approval.

Data transfers

Contractual measures were put in place for cross-border data transfers. When a data transfer is required in a country recognized as not having an adequate level of data protection, FMR ensures that EU Standard Contractual Clauses are in place, implementing appropriate technical and organizational measures for protecting personal data.

Depending on the services required, the following actions will be undertaken:

• Health Care Professionals, patients, caregivers, and consumers recruitment
• Carry out interviews face-to-face, in the studio, online (web-assisted), over the phone or in-field
• Simultaneous translation or voice-over
• Compensation of the respondents
• Transcription or delivery of the information collected during the interviews, such as filled-in questionnaires
• Translation of materials
• Consolidated data analysis

FMR will ensure that data delivered are anonymized and that the process abides by the laws and rules applying to data protection as laid out by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as of May 25th, 2018.

Data Protection Principles

The GDPR imposes significant requirements for organizational compliance measures and safeguards such as enshrining privacy by design and default, use of data protection impact assessments (DPIA’s), keeping comprehensive data processing records, and mandatory reporting of data breaches. Most important is accountability, requiring that data controllers are responsible for, and can demonstrate compliance with the following six general privacy principles:

• Lawfulness, fairness, and transparency – Personal data is processed lawfully, fairly, and transparently. Purpose limitation – Personal data is obtained for specified, explicit, and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner incompatible with those purposes. Further processing is allowed for archiving, scientific, statistical, and historical research purposes.
• Data minimization – Personal data processed is adequate, relevant, and limited to what is necessary.
• Accuracy – Personal data is accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date.
• Storage limitation– Personal data is not kept longer than is necessary (but data processed for archiving, scientific, statistical, and historical research purposes can be kept longer subject to safeguards).
• Integrity and confidentiality – Appropriate technical and organizational measures are put in place to guard against unauthorized or unlawful processing, loss, damage, or destruction.

Personal Data

GDPR covers personal data, i.e., information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person; who can be identified directly or indirectly by that data on its own or together with other data.
Personal data is categorized as special data, and this essentially is sensitive personal data covering religious or philosophical beliefs, health, racial or ethnic origin, trade union membership, political beliefs, sex life or sexual orientation, genetic data, and biometric data (including photos when used to uniquely identify a natural person) of individuals. The collection and use of special data are subject to greater restrictions than other types of personal data.

In the research context, it is important to recognize a difference between data that identifies a participant in a market, opinion, and social research project from data obtained from participants during fieldwork, such as responses provided, opinions expressed, etc. The first category of identifiable demographic details (personal data), but the participants’ responses will only be considered personal data when they can be linked to the demographic details (or if the responses themselves have identifiable details within them). Sound and video recordings and still images should always be considered personal data in light of the ease of linking these to a person.
The ease of technology in doing this means there is a higher risk of re-identifying this type of material. Transcripts of recordings are used in order to properly anonymize them. Researchers separate these different categories of information and resort to the anonymization of personal data as working with anonymized data (i.e., participant responses which cannot identify an individual), the requirements of the data protection rules are no longer applicable. Data can also be “pseudonymized.” Pseudonymized data is personal data that has been processed so that it can no longer be attributed to a specific data subject without the use of additional information, such as a unique identifier that can make the data identifiable. An original string of data, even without the identifier, can still be personal data (in the hands of an organization that holds both the dataset and the identifier) since it can be matched again with the original database to make the data in a string identifiable. In order to become pseudonymized data, the additional 4 Article 4 (1) GDPR. 5 Information about criminal convictions and offenses is treated separately and is subject to tighter controls. Conducting Research under the GDPR: Legal Bases June 2017 v.1.4 7 information must be kept separately and held subject to adequate technical and organizational measures. The data can then be pseudonymized even where the identifier is kept within the same organization.6 Pseudonymised data is still personal data, but pseudonymization of the data is a security technique that provides a mechanism for reducing the level of exposure under the GDPR. The transition from personal data sets held by researchers to pseudonymized and anonymized datasets is set out in Figure 1.

FMR researchers take steps to anonymize data early in the research cycle and follow regulatory guidance to keep up to date with the limits of effective anonymization in a digital environment.
Regulators do not look to the absolute impossibility of identification; rather, they consider the likelihood of re-identification occurring. GDPR sets out a clear preference for processing personal data used in research to the point where data subjects cannot be identified.

GDPR does not apply to data that does not relate to or identify an individual, such as aggregated data sets that show general trends without identifying people, or commercial data, such as sales or revenue figures which do not contain personally identifiable information.
FMR employees are obliged to follow policies and procedures regarding confidentiality, security, and privacy. We adhere to the following industry requirements:

• ESOMAR professional Codes of Conduct.
• EphMRA (European Pharmaceutical Market Research Association).
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and any subsequent legislation may be amended from time to time.

Accuracy:
Reasonable steps are taken to keep personal information in our possession or control, which is used on an on- going basis, accurate, complete, current, and relevant, based on the most recent information available to us.
Children’s data collection:
We never knowingly invite children under the age of 16 years to participate in research studies without
consent. Suppose it is necessary and appropriate to a particular project to directly involve children under the age of 16 years. In that case, we ensure their parent or legal guardian has permitted us. This must be verified with an ID from that individual, and they must confirm that no further consent from any other parent or guardian is required.

Rights of individuals:
Health Care Professionals, patients, caregivers, and consumers have the right to request access to personal information.
Under current EU data protection laws, all participants have the right to access, rectify or erase their personal information from our systems unless we have legitimate interest reasons for continuing to process it.
Under current EU data protection laws, researchers are not authorized to make any individual analyses but only consolidate analyses of all respondents.
From 25 May 2018, individuals have the following rights in relation to personal information:

• Right to change your mind and to withdraw consent.
• Right to access personal data
• Right to erase personal data from our systems unless there is a legitimate interest reason for continuing to process the information
• Right to port personal data (portability right), if appropriate
• Right to restrict processing of personal data
• Right to object to the processing of personal data

Principles relating to the processing of personal data

Definition: ‘personal data means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.
Personal data shall be:
a. processed lawfully, fairly, and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject (‘lawfulness, fairness and transparency);
b. collected for specified, explicit, and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes; further processing for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes, or statistical purposes shall, in accordance with Article 89(1), not be considered to be incompatible with the initial purposes (‘purpose limitation’);
c. adequate, relevant, and limited to what is necessary for relation to the purposes for which they are processed (‘data minimization’);
d. accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date; every reasonable step must be taken to ensure that personal data that are inaccurate, having regard to the purposes for which they are processed, are erased or rectified without delay (‘accuracy’);
e. kept in a form that permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed; personal data may be stored for longer periods insofar as the personal data will be processed solely for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes in accordance with Article 89(1) subject to the implementation of the appropriate technical and organizational measures required by this Regulation in order to safeguard the rights and freedoms of the data subject (‘storage limitation’);
f. processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data, including protection against unauthorized or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, destruction, or damage, using appropriate technical or organizational measures (‘integrity and confidentiality).
Under the OECD Privacy Principles, any personal data should be obtained by lawful and fair means and, where appropriate, with the knowledge or consent of the data subject. Generally, national laws provide a number of lawful and fairgrounds, but in most instances, researchers will be obliged to rely on consent.
Consent must be:

• free (voluntary and able to be withdrawn at any time);
• specific (relating to one or more identified purposes);
• informed (in full awareness of all relevant consequences of giving consent). Consent must also be clearly indicated by a statement or action by the data subject having been provided with the information set out under the items below:
-he or she should be informed about
(a) the use to which his or her personal data will be put;
(b) the specific data to be collected;
(c) the name, address, and contact information of the company or organization collecting the data and, if not the same organization, the data controller
(d) whether data will be disclosed to third parties.

Data storage and retention:
Personal information will be retained only for such period as is appropriate for its intended and lawful use. In this case, we shall retain data for no longer than 6 months, after which they will be destroyed them with proof of this destruction unless otherwise required to do so by law. Personal information that is no longer required will be disposed of in ways that ensure its confidential nature is not compromised.
All archives are retained for a defined period of time in a strictly controlled environment. Once expired, the data is deleted, and the physical media is destroyed to ensure the data is erased completely.
The use of appropriate security safeguards to provide necessary protection includes:

• physical measures (locked filing cabinets, restricting access to offices, alarm systems, security cameras)
• technological tools (passwords, encryption, firewalls)
• organizational controls (background checks, rules relating to taking computers off-site, limiting access on a “need-to-know” basis, staff training, agreements with clients and subcontractors)

The security policy also includes a procedure for dealing with a potential data breach in which personal data is disclosed. In the case of secondary data collected by another party, such as a client’s database, that party must be informed immediately. Data subjects whose data was disclosed also must be notified if the disclosure exposes them to some risk (e.g., identity theft) and appropriate steps taken to protect against that risk.

Photographs, audio, and video recordings

A number of new research techniques create, store, and transmit photographs, audio, and video recordings as part of the research process. Two prominent examples are ethnography and mystery shopping.
Photographs, audio, and video recordings are personal data and must be handled as such.
Some types of observational research may involve photographing, videoing, or recording in public settings involving people who have not been recruited as data subjects. In such instances, researchers need permission to share such images from those data subjects whose faces are clearly visible and can be identified. If permission cannot be obtained, then the data subject’s image should be pixelated or otherwise anonymized. In addition,
clear and legible signs should be placed to indicate that the area is under observation, along with contact details for the individual or organization responsible. Cameras should be sited so that they monitor only the areas intended for observation.
Audio and video recordings will not be stored for more than 6 months, after which they will be destroyed with proof of this destruction unless otherwise required to do so by law.