Market Research: Foundations to Practice · Research Ethics, Privacy, and Compliance
Informed Consent and Data Privacy
Genuine informed consent requires more than a checkbox, and the growing use of AI in analysis introduces privacy questions the standard consent language of a decade ago never anticipated. This chapter covers what's actually required.
Genuine informed consent requires clearly telling participants what the research is about, how their data will be used, how long it will be retained, and who specifically will have access to it, in language that a typical participant can genuinely understand, rather than lengthy, dense legal language that technically discloses these facts while functionally failing to actually inform the average participant of anything they can meaningfully act on.
- Genuine informed consent requires clear, understandable language about data use, retention, and access, not dense legal language that technically discloses but doesn't actually inform.
- GDPR and similar regulations impose binding requirements: a legal processing basis, data subject rights, and cross-border transfer restrictions, regardless of commercial or academic context.
- Genuine anonymization requires more than removing a name field, since combinations of details can still allow re-identification of an individual.
- AI tools used for analysis introduce new privacy questions about data retention and model training that the participant never specifically consented to.