We’re proud to say that at Cint we’ve built one of the world’s largest consumer networks for digital survey-based research, harnessing the insights of over 335 million engaged respondents across more than 130 countries around the globe. We’re here to feed the world’s curiosity.
We’re also proud to say that security, safety, and privacy are at the heart of our organization. Whether you’re an individual survey respondent or a valued customer, Cint is able to guarantee that your data is in good hands.
Organizations that work with data have an obligation to gather, analyze and use that data ethically and responsibly. Because we know that the data divined through our platforms has the power to influence outcomes — ranging from consumer spending habits to the biggest elections on the planet — we do everything we can to ensure that nothing is too much when it comes to data protection.
Dhruv Mathur, Vice President, Information Security, Cint and Caroline Tahon, Data Protection Officer, Cint, are experts when it comes to considering how best to keep data as safe and secure as possible.
Mathur, who describes himself as having his “finger on the pulse,” of Cint’s cybersecurity posture notes that, “Our ability to sell what we do, does, to some extent, hinge on security. Security, in the tech landscape, is not just about stopping bad stuff happening. It also includes enabling businesses to do what they want to do.”
To provide all-rounded support to our customers, we need to keep up to speed with privacy and security changes in the data sector.
“It’s important to understand that the number of privacy regulations in place has sharply increased around the world,” Tahon says. These include major regulatory changes like the EU-wide shifts around GDPR, but also apply to privacy-related legal frameworks in Brazil, Australia, and the US.
“Cint is a global player. And if we want to continue being a global player, we have to play according to the rules of where our customers and panelists are,” says Tahon.
As the market research industry adapts to a rapidly changing world, Cint remains steadfastly committed to being innovative — without ever losing sight of having a robust approach to safety and security.
Talking about the importance of positioning privacy as a non-negotiable, Tahon invokes the legal concept of privacy by design.
“As a DPO, I spend time with engineers and developers when they have ideas, so if they have to include some privacy settings they can do it from the beginning.”
Tahon goes on to say that it is vital to really think through what data Cint is looking to collect and the usefulness of said data. “We have a discussion about what we really need. There are advantages to not having millions of pieces of data you don’t need. That limits the amount of issues we might have.”
For Mathur, innovation and security are very much allied. “I would say that innovation is enabled by security, by ensuring that the innovation is not just functionally better, but also more secure.”
He uses the banking sector as an example of how security and innovation are entwined. While in 2024 consumers might be happy to press their card on a contactless device to pay for everything from groceries to graduation gowns, this wasn’t always the case.
The banks had to persuade customers that going cashless was safe and that they’d be insured against fraud.
“It was security that changed consumer behavior completely, to the point where now, without thinking about it, we do online transactions, we tap our cards, our watches, our phones — we do all these things without thinking about the security aspects anymore.”
It’s all a matter of trust. “As we innovate we can embed security in the right way, and we can create that trust and confidence within our customer base,” Mathur says.
Cint works with huge amounts of data on a daily basis and for everyone’s sake we need to ensure that it is as accurate and secure as possible. At Cint, quality is as crucial as quantity.
That’s why 2023 saw us introduce our Trust Score model to help combat fraud — a fraught issue in the world of market research.
Cint’s Trust Score is a proprietary solution for ensuring that the people who reach your surveys are honest and real human beings. Using AI and machine learning, the model predicts the likelihood of someone becoming fraudulent or not. If and when the system detects what it considers to be potentially fraudulent behavior on the part of a user, their session will be terminated.
This allows us to catch bad actors quicker than ever before — a necessity when it comes to ensuring that every precaution possible has been taken when it comes to protecting sensitive data.
Everyone at Cint is dedicated to making sure that we remain the go-to when it comes to combating fraud and other possible sources of malevolence in the market research sector.
That’s why our trust and safety operations team are in place, alongside our five crucial components of quality.
The following five pillars are the ways in which we consistently strive to deliver the safest solutions possible for panelists and customers:
- Respondent quality: We use multiple metrics to ensure that our respondents are real and representative
- Supplier quality: Supply partners are vetted for sample and research quality
- Buyer quality: Cint aims to solely seek clients whose surveys provide a good experience for respondents
- Operational quality: We are constantly measuring our own performance on both objective and subjective criteria
- Product quality: Our goal is to be ranked consistently as best-in-class both through external benchmarks in the marketplace, and ratings by our clients and suppliers
As Mathur puts it, “across the tech industry we’re seeing buyer behaviors changing over time. Security and privacy are at the top of people’s agendas. It’s a board level agenda item for a lot of companies. Nowadays, customers are no longer looking at just functional products. They’re looking at functional, resilient and compliant products, and all three are equally important.”
We’re secure, so you can be safe in the knowledge that when it comes to upholding extremely high standards of privacy Cint is leading the way.
