The Department of Homeland Security (DHS or Department) will use SurveyMonkey to create online surveys for external relations (communications/outreach/public dialogue). DHS will also use SurveyMonkey to meet a mandate by the Federal CIO to provide customer satisfaction surveys on public-facing websites. DHS Office of Public Affairs (OPA) serves as the executive agent for the department’s use of SurveyMonkey and controls who at the Department has access to use the service.
SurveyMonkey is a third-party tool that allows you to easily create, collect, and analyze any kind of online survey project, be it for market research, a quick poll, competitive analysis or customer/employee feedback. SurveyMonkey's privacy policy can be found at https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/legal/privacy/. DHS privacy policy and Privacy Impact Assessments (PIA) govern the Department’s use of SurveyMonkey from a privacy perspective. The DHS privacy policy can be found at www.dhs.gov/privacy-policy. The DHS PIAs that are applicable are DHS/ALL/PIA-031 Use of Social Networking Interactions and Applications Communications/Outreach/Public Dialogue and DHS/ALL/PIA-069 DHS Surveys, Interviews, and Focus Groups.
DHS has concluded that users engaging with a DHS survey as provided by SurveyMonkey fully expect privacy protections while interacting with the Department. While users may have been required to submit some personally identifiable information (PII) while filling out a survey, the Department will notify the user as to the purpose of the collection and the retention policy. For the Department's customer satisfaction surveys on public-facing websites that use SurveyMonkey, no PII is required, asked for, or retained. Beyond that, DHS will only collect information posted to a SurveyMonkey survey that is necessary for the proper performance of official Department functions.
DHS will use SurveyMonkey to: 1) establish user names and passwords to form administrator profiles; 2) provide customer satisfaction surveys on public-facing websites; and 3) create other surveys as permitted by the Paperwork Reduction Act and the DHS Privacy Impact Assessment process.
To protect your privacy and the privacy of others, do not include your full name, date of birth, social security number, address, phone numbers, email addresses, case numbers or any other sensitive PII on public-facing SurveyMonkey surveys.
DHS may share information submitted through a SurveyMonkey survey if there is a demonstrated need to know, and will only post information after it has been appropriately approved and vetted by DHS OPA. DHS will also make every attempt to aggregate and anonymize responses to the greatest extent possible while still ensuring the proper performance of official Department functions.