Security Aspects of Online Surveys

Abstract

After online survey softwares and services had appeared on the Internet data collection became as easy for anyone as sending electronic postcards. Though wide range of publications is available about creating professional quality surveys, security aspects of this kind of questionnaires has not been investigated yet. To stop this gap in our current work we suggest a framework for developing efficient data collection processes using standards from information security and privacy, based on the analogy between software and online survey development, in order to produce services meeting the researchers’ requirements. Beside the theoretical results of our methodology we present its steps and usability on a real world practical example where the main decision points are discussed of the proposed phases.