While you have a SurveyMonkey account, we retain data associated with your account.
If your account is inactive, we may delete your SurveyMonkey Basic (free) account and survey data in accordance with our data retention policy.
In the case of either a SurveyMonkey paid account or SurveyMonkey Basic (free) account, we may retain the data associated with your account longer as required by applicable law.
With per-survey response limits, you can view a set number of responses per survey according to your plan. Responses over the survey’s limit aren’t viewable and will be deleted. However, if you need access to specific over-limit responses to comply with legal obligations, such as to fulfill a data subject request, then please contact customer support.
[Coming soon] You may also choose to immediately delete all survey responses over your account limit. Alternatively, we will automatically delete them 1 year after they were collected—in accordance with our retention period.
To view and keep access to those responses, upgrade to a paid plan before they're deleted. You can go to My Surveys or the new Homepage (beta) to see which surveys have responses over your plan's limit if you want to upgrade to a paid plan.
The following sections describe who can delete data, how long it's retained, and whether it can be restored.
Some residual copies of deleted data may remain on backup media up to 90 days after the deletion has occurred, at which point it will be overwritten.
We generally don't use deleted survey data for any purpose, however in limited circumstances, we may retain other data about your account and historical usage for the following reasons:
In these cases, we ensure that access to the data is blocked except for the purposes for which we have been required to retain the information. The data is deleted as soon as that purpose no longer exists. We also retain aggregate anonymous usage and meta data which doesn’t identify you or any of your respondents.
We understand that survey responses can capture a wide range of information, some of which may be sensitive, confidential, or proprietary—both to the account owner and survey takers. SurveyMonkey values the trust that our customers, whether they be individuals or large organizations, place in us by letting us be the custodians of their survey data.
Our Privacy Notice details how we handle your survey data. We aim to be transparent with our privacy practices so there aren't any surprises. We won't use your surveys or information collected from your surveys in any way other than as described in our Privacy Notice.
Our Security Statement and white paper describe the security measures we use to keep your data secure. We make every effort to ensure that your data is handled and stored securely.
We also require you, as a survey creator, to be responsible for good privacy practices for those taking your survey. This can help improve response rates and the survey-taking experience. Learn more about data collection and privacy best practices and adding a consent statement or privacy notice to your survey.
As an international company, we have data centers in the United States, Canada, and Ireland. Depending on your plan type and region, you may have the option to store your survey and response data in a regional data center. Regardless of the data center you use, we may access our other data centers to implement, maintain, repair, or upgrade our services for our customers.
If your data is stored in a regional data center, you can see the location listed in the Account Details on your My Account page. If you don't see anything listed, your data is stored on servers located in the United States.
If your data is stored in a regional data center, expand the section on your region to learn more.