Qualtrics Survey Security Best Practices

There are a number of additional security settings that can be enabled, allowing you to secure your Qualtrics surveys and maintain the integrity of your data.

These options can all be accessed by going to the Survey tab in the top menu, selecting the Survey Options tab in the side menu, and then the Security tab in the pop out menu. See the example below:

We recommend that you activate the Bot Detection setting as best practice.

Bot Detection

This setting helps determine if a survey response was from a human or a bot. When you enable bot detection, this adds a Q_RecaptchaScore field in your survey data that indicates whether a response is more likely from a bot or a human. This field uses Google’s invisible reCAPTCHA technology to give each response a score between 0-1. A score that is greater than or equal to 0.5 means the respondent is likely a human. A score that is less than 0.5 means the respondent is likely a bot. To enable Bot detection, simply follow these steps:

1. Go to Survey options.
   
   
2. Go to Security
   
   
3. Toggle the switch to enable Bot Detection.

The rest of the Security Settings can be used at your discretion. Some may be situational based on the type of survey you are conducting. Feel free to use any of the following to help secure your survey:

All of these options may be switched on by going to Survey options and then going to the Security settings. See the screenshot at the beginning of this article.

Survey Access

Select whether you would like your survey available to anyone, or by invitation only.

• Available to anyone: By default, respondents with either the anonymous link or an individual link can take your survey.
• Invitation only: Only respondents sent a personal link or invited over email (with the default individual link) can access the survey. No one can enter the survey using the anonymous link or the “multiple completes” link.

If an individual tries to access your survey with an anonymous or “multiple completes” link when the Invitation Only setting is turned on, they will receive a message that says, “This survey can only be taken by invitation.”

Password Protection

Select whether you would like to set a password for users to gain access to your survey here.

Add a Referral Website URL

This option allows you to grant access to a survey from a specific website. You provide the URL of the webpage where your survey will be linked from.

Prevent Multiple Submissions

This setting allows your survey to place a cookie in your users’ browsers to help determine whether that user has already submitted a request and prevent multiple submissions by the same user. You can use a default message page or set a custom one here. You may also choose to redirect them to a URL after the survey, or have their responses flagged.

Security Scan Monitor

This option helps prevent email scanning software from taking the survey by using a link it finds in a user’s email. 

RelevantID

This option looks at user metadata to help determine if the same user is taking the same surveys repeatedly. You can specify how long the data is flagged for.

Prevent Indexing

This option helps stop search engines from presenting your survey within their search results. By selecting this option, this helps keep your survey out of search engine results to prevent unwanted respondents from accessing the survey.

Uploaded Files Access

With this option enabled, files uploaded as part of a survey response can only be viewed by users with permission to view responses.

Anonymize Responses

This option allows your survey to help purge any data that may identify a user when anonymous data are warranted. This can remove information, such as IP addresses or location data. It does not remove the survey's email distribution history from Qualtrics’ servers but disables your ability to download the history. If turned on before survey responses are collected, such information will be permanently inaccessible, but if turned on after responses are collected the information may be able to be retrieved.