Panelist Privacy FAQs

If you join a Nielsen panel or participate in a Nielsen survey, we will ask you for your name and address and perhaps the names of the other members of your household. We will ask you for some demographic details, such as your level of education, age and ethnicity (where allowed by local law). We will collect your viewing and/or buying behavior and additional information from data brokers and other companies that are allowed by law to provide such information to us. We collect a substantial amount of third-party data about Nielsen panelists in order to understand as much as possible about how media consumption patterns are associated with demographics; we typically collect much less—if any—third-party data concerning survey respondents.

We deeply value your trust, and we protect the identities of our panelists. We use tools and methods, including data aggregation, to make sure that there is no reasonable possibility of identifying an individual panelist from the data in the reports that we create for our clients. We will NOT use your data to advertise, promote or market third-party goods or services directly to you, nor do we allow our clients to use your identifying data to market directly to you. However, you may see online ads from third parties based in part on data produced by the Nielsen Marketing Cloud or Nielsen Catalina Solutions, but this will simply be because you are an internet user and is completely unrelated to your participation as a panelist or survey respondent.

We also create scientific reports based on modeled information. “Modeled information” is data we have developed based on demographic and behavioral characteristics like your gender, age, TV watching habits, and the websites you visit to predict what people with similar or matching characteristics would watch or buy. We take precautions to ensure this data cannot be reverse-engineered to identify you.

Keeping data secure and protecting panelist identity are essential to our success and credibility. We have established security measures, including encryption methods and internal and external access protocols, to help protect the security and confidentiality of your data while in our care.

If you agree to participate in one of our online or mobile panels, the metering software or application that you install onto your device collects data about what you do on your device, and as you surf the Internet.

We prefer to collect data about your entire household when you take a Nielsen survey or join a panel. Receiving data from your entire household helps provide a more robust understanding of consumer behavior.

We take the privacy and safety of children very seriously. If we collect information about, or get opinions from minor children, we do so only with the consent of the child’s parent or guardian, which can be withdrawn at any time.

Nielsen researches what consumers watch, buy, their preferences, and behaviors. The more our clients know about consumers, the better they can tailor products and services to what you want and need.

We are very protective of your data. We are a global performance management company and do not give your contact data to others for them to use for their own purposes. If we work with other companies to perform market research or to develop new products and it becomes necessary for them to have access to your contact data, they can access it only at our direction and cannot use it for their own purposes. They must also ensure that they will keep your data confidential and secure.

Absolutely not. The contact data that you give Nielsen is not given out for promotional purposes.

Nielsen will retain panelists’ data so that we know who has been a panelist in the past, for legal (e.g., tax) reasons, or to support quality or security audits. Access to panelists’ identifying data is very limited, even within Nielsen. We use de-identified data about former panelists for market research purposes (e.g., tracking trends and changing consumer behavior over a period of years), or to intentionally clutter data sets containing current panelists in order to help protect their identities. We may store former panelists’ data in its country of origin or abroad for such purposes, but our privacy practices described in this statement apply in either case.

Simply contact us and ask to view or delete this data at any time. If we have disassociated data about you from your identifying information, however, we may not be able to provide the data that has been de-identified.