1. When these terms apply
Most studies you find on Voxa take you to a researcher's own platform to complete. Some studies run inside Voxa itself, using our own task and survey tools. We call those Hosted Studies, and we make it clear before you accept one.
These Supplementary Terms apply whenever you take part in a Hosted Study. They sit alongside the Participant Terms you accepted when you registered, which continue to apply in full. Where these terms conflict with the Participant Terms, these take priority.
Almost nothing changes for you. How you find and accept studies, how submissions are approved or rejected, the fixed 21-day automatic approval period, how Rewards are set and paid, and your right to appeal all work exactly the same way.
2. What is actually different
The difference is who holds your answers.
In an ordinary study, your answers go straight to the researcher on their own platform and we never see them. In a Hosted Study, your answers and any files you upload are stored on our systems, because we are running the study on the researcher's behalf.
- We share your Submission with the researcher who is running the study, and with nobody else. The only exception is where the law requires disclosure, or where we need to take confidential advice from our lawyers or insurers, or to establish or defend a legal claim.
- We do not use your answers for our own purposes. We hold them to run the study and support the researcher.
- We may look at part of a Submission where we have to: to resolve a dispute or appeal between you and the researcher, to investigate a complaint, where a safeguarding or legal concern arises, or to fix a technical fault.
- We may run automated authenticity checks over a Submission, as described in the Participant Terms, and share a high-level indicator with the researcher. We do not read Submissions to do this.
- We will never use your answers to train general-purpose machine learning models.
3. Who is responsible for your data
The researcher running the Hosted Study is the data controller for your answers. They decide what to ask and what to do with the results, so their privacy notice applies to that data, not ours. It is their responsibility to make sure their collection and use of your data complies with the law, and we are not responsible for their use or misuse of it.
We act as that researcher's data processor for your answers, which means we handle them on their instructions and cannot use them for our own purposes.
We remain the controller, under our own Participant Privacy Notice, for everything else: your account, your profile and screening answers, your reservation and submission records, your Rewards, and the fraud and authenticity signals we generate.
4. What a researcher cannot ask you in a Hosted Study
We place hard limits on Hosted Studies that do not exist when a study runs on a researcher's own platform:
- Researchers must not ask for direct identifiers: your name, email address, phone number, full postcode, date of birth, or social media or gaming usernames.
- Researchers must not collect special category data, which includes anything about your health, race or ethnicity, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, genetic or biometric data, sex life or sexual orientation.
5. How long we keep your answers
We delete Submissions to a Hosted Study, including any files you uploaded, six months after you submit them. This happens automatically.
The researcher can export your answers before then and may keep their own copy under their own retention policy. Deleting our copy does not delete theirs: if you want their copy deleted you need to ask them, and their privacy notice tells you how.
We keep the records that show you took part and were paid: your reservation, the status of your submission, the Reward, and the related wallet and audit entries. Those contain no study content and are retained under the schedule in our Participant Privacy Notice.
6. Your Submission
Everything in the Participant Terms about submission quality, honesty, original work and the ban on automated content generation applies in exactly the same way to a Hosted Study.
Your Submission must not contain unlawful, offensive or infringing material. Because we host it, that content creates risk for us as well as for the researcher, and we may remove it and act on your account.
As with any study, the intellectual property in your Submission vests in the researcher when you submit it, as set out in the Participant Terms.
7. Authenticity checks
A researcher can ask us to check how answers in a Hosted Study were produced. When that is switched on we tell you on the screen before the first question, and it applies only to that study.
What we measure is the shape of your typing, not your words: how long a field was open, how quickly and evenly you typed, how much text arrived by pasting, and whether the page lost focus immediately before a large paste. We never record what you type, and we never run your answers through a text detector. Detectors of that kind are unreliable and tend to misjudge people writing in a second language, which is why we do not use them.
The result is a rating of high, mixed, low, or not checked, shown to the researcher alongside your submission. It is a prompt to read your answers carefully. It is advice, and on its own it is never a reason to reject you. A researcher who rejects a submission must still give a specific, verifiable reason, and you keep the same right to appeal.
There are ordinary reasons an honest submission can be rated low. Drafting an answer elsewhere and pasting it in, using dictation or another assistive input tool, or switching tabs to reread the instructions can all look the same to a measurement of this kind. If you are rejected and you believe a check misread how you worked, say so in your appeal.
These measurements are kept with your Hosted Study responses and are deleted on the same schedule. You can ask for a copy or ask us to erase them, as set out in the Voxa Participant Privacy Notice.
8. Changes
We may revise these Supplementary Terms and will give you at least 14 days' notice of a material change, normally by service message or email. A change required by law or needed to address a security risk may take effect immediately. Changes do not affect Hosted Studies already listed before they take effect.