Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

StaffHero is operated by GroundForm Software LLC (“StaffHero”, “we”, “us”), registered at 30 N Gould St, STE R, Sheridan, WY 82801, USA (a Wyoming limited liability company). StaffHero provides anonymous employee pulse surveys and an AI-generated “Leadership Brief” to lean teams.

For privacy questions, or to exercise your rights, contact us at hello@staffhero.com. Our data protection contact is the StaffHero privacy team.

2. Who this policy is for

We process personal data about three groups of people, and our role under data-protection law differs for each. A controller decides why and how data is used; a processor only acts on a controller’s instructions:

• Website visitors — people who browse our marketing site. We are the controller.
• Customers & administrators — people who sign up, run a workspace, and manage surveys. We are the controller for account, billing, and support data.
• Employees / respondents — people invited by a customer to answer a survey. Here the customer (the employer) is the controller and decides why surveys run; StaffHero acts as a processor on the customer’s behalf under our Data Processing Agreement.

3. What we collect and why

Website visitors

• Device and usage data (pages viewed, approximate region, performance) via analytics — only after you accept non-essential cookies. See our Cookie Policy.
• If you reach us from one of our ads: the ad-click identifier and campaign parameters in the link, used only to measure which ads lead to a signup — and only after you accept non-essential cookies. See our Cookie Policy.
• Anything you submit through a contact form: your name and email, used to respond to you.
• If you join our early-access waitlist or opt in to updates: your name and email, used to send occasional product news. You can unsubscribe from any such email at any time, and it won’t affect any account you later open.

Customers & administrators

• Account data: name, work email, organization, role, language and region preferences (via our auth provider).
• Employee roster you upload to run surveys: names and emails of your team, plus any segments you define (e.g. team, tenure, and optionally attributes such as gender or age band, which receive extra confidentiality protection). You are responsible for having a lawful basis to provide these — see the Customer responsibilities section of our Terms.
• Billing data: handled by our payment providers — Stripe (where we sell to you directly) and Paddle (acting as our Merchant of Record). They handle your payment details; we receive transaction metadata, not full card numbers.
• Support and communications: messages you send us and our replies.

Employees / respondents

• Survey answers: eNPS scores, topic ratings, and any open-text comments you choose to write.
• A private internal reference used only to prevent double-submission and to route anonymous follow-up questions back to you. It is never shown to your employer (see “How anonymity works”).
• We do not log your IP address against your responses, and survey pages carry no tracking pixels or fingerprinting.
• Survey invitations and reminders are transactional emails we send on your employer’s behalf as part of running their survey — they are not StaffHero marketing, and responding never signs you up to hear from us.

4. Lawful bases (GDPR)

• Providing the service to customers — performance of a contract.
• Employee survey processing — the customer (employer) sets the lawful basis (typically its legitimate interests in understanding and improving the workplace, or an employment-related basis). Because of the power imbalance at work, we do not rely on employee consent as the basis for core survey processing.
• Website analytics, advertising, and other non-essential cookies — your consent.
• Security, fraud/abuse prevention, and product improvement — our legitimate interests.
• Legal and tax obligations — compliance with law.

Where we rely on your consent (for example, non-essential cookies or our product-update emails), you can withdraw it at any time; withdrawing consent doesn’t affect any processing we already carried out.

5. How anonymity works — and its limits

Anonymity in StaffHero is enforced in our application code, not promised in a setting. Your employer sees grouped results only; no screen, export, report, or query we expose to them reveals who said what. Results for a group stay hidden until at least 5 people respond, and verbatim comments until at least 7 — small or sensitive segments are held to a higher bar or merged — so individuals are far harder to identify by elimination.

Managers can read comments verbatim once a group clears the comment threshold, but never attached to a name. Our AI Leadership Brief is grounded in those real comments and reports patterns; identity is stripped and unsafe content filtered before it is generated. Response timestamps carry a small random jitter as an extra safeguard.

Honest limits: no system can guarantee that a comment which names the writer, or describes something only one person could know, stays unidentifiable. We explain this to respondents before they answer and design thresholds to reduce the risk. For more detail, see our Security page.

6. AI processing

The Leadership Brief is generated using Anthropic’s commercial API. We send only aggregate numbers and de-identified open-text samples (from groups above the comment threshold) as prompts — never names, emails, or the internal routing reference. Outputs are stored with your workspace in your region. We use Anthropic’s API under terms that do not use inputs or outputs to train Anthropic’s models, and we don’t retain the prompts beyond generating your brief. The providers we use are listed on our Subprocessors page.

The Brief summarises themes for a human to read. It does not make automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about anyone, and it is never used to evaluate, rank, or make decisions about a specific employee. Because comments are de-identified and aggregated before processing, the Brief reflects patterns across a group, not statements attributed to a person.

7. Cookies & analytics

We use a small number of strictly-necessary cookies and, only with your consent, non-essential analytics and advertising cookies (including Google Analytics and Google Ads on our marketing site, and PostHog product analytics across our website and the signed-in app). Our product analytics include click and scroll heatmaps and session replay, recorded with all text and form inputs masked, and are never used on the anonymous survey pages. One choice in our cookie banner covers analytics and advertising together — accepting turns them on, declining keeps them off. The anonymous survey pages set no cookies and carry no advertising or identifying analytics. Full detail and controls are in our Cookie Policy.

8. Sharing & international transfers

We share data only with the subprocessors that help us run the service (hosting, auth, email, analytics, advertising, AI, billing, error monitoring), each under a data processing agreement. We do not sell your personal data for money. With your consent, our marketing site uses Google’s analytics and advertising cookies (Google Analytics and Google Ads) to measure traffic and ad performance; depending on configuration this can involve “sharing” online identifiers for cross-context behavioural advertising as defined under some US state laws. These run only if you opt in, and you can turn them off or withdraw consent at any time in our cookie banner. The full list of providers, with purposes and locations, is on our Subprocessors page.

We never pool one customer’s data with another’s. Your workspace’s responses, comments, and briefs are isolated to your organisation; we do not combine them across customers, sell them, or use them to build any cross-customer dataset or benchmark, and we do not use your employees’ survey content to train AI models.

Survey and account data are stored in the region you choose (EU or US). Where data is transferred across borders (for example, to a US-based provider), we rely on appropriate safeguards such as the EU Standard Contractual Clauses — and the UK Addendum for UK data — or an adequacy decision where one applies.

9. How long we keep data

10. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you have rights over your personal data. These can include the right to access a copy of it, to correct it, to delete it, to receive it in a portable form, to restrict or object to certain processing, and — where we rely on consent — to withdraw that consent. In the EU/UK you can also complain to your local data-protection supervisory authority.

To make a request, email hello@staffhero.com and tell us what you’d like to do. We may need to confirm your identity first — usually by checking you control the email address on the account — so that we only disclose data to the right person. We’ll acknowledge your request within a few days and aim to respond within one month; for complex requests we may extend this by up to two further months and will tell you why. There’s no charge unless a request is clearly unfounded or excessive. If you’re unhappy with our response, you can ask us to reconsider.

For employee survey data, your employer is the controller, so we’ll route your request to them or help them respond. We can help an employer correct or remove someone’s roster details and, where needed, delete a survey round. Today we don’t offer deletion of a single response in isolation, and genuinely anonymous, aggregated results may not be reversible to an individual at all. We won’t discriminate against you for exercising your rights.

11. US state privacy rights

If you’re a resident of California or another US state with a privacy law, you have rights to know and access the personal information we hold about you (and the categories we collect, use, and disclose), to correct it, and to delete it, subject to legal exceptions.

We do not sell your personal information for money. With your consent, our marketing site uses Google’s advertising and analytics cookies; depending on how they are configured, this can count as “sharing” personal information (such as online identifiers) for cross-context behavioural advertising under California and similar US state laws. These cookies are off by default and run only if you opt in, so you can exercise your right to opt out at any time by declining them — or withdrawing consent — through our cookie banner and the “Cookie settings” link in the footer (see our Cookie Policy). Under California’s “Shine the Light” law, we do not disclose personal information to third parties for their own direct marketing.

We will not discriminate against you for exercising these rights — your price and service stay the same. You may use an authorized agent to make a request for you; we’ll ask for proof of their authority and may still verify your identity directly. Where a request concerns survey data, your employer is the business/controller and we’ll route or assist as described above. To exercise any of these rights, contact hello@staffhero.com.

12. Security

We use encryption in transit and at rest (via our managed database provider), strict per-organization data isolation, rate-limiting and abuse protection, PII-free audit logging, and the confidentiality controls described above. No system is perfectly secure, but security is designed in from the schema up. More detail is on our Security page.

If a personal-data breach affecting your information occurs, we’ll act promptly to contain and assess it, and notify the people and authorities we’re legally required to, without undue delay. For survey data — where your employer is the controller — we notify the employer so they can meet their own obligations (see our DPA).

13. Children

StaffHero is a workplace tool intended for adults and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 16.

14. Changes & contact

We may update this policy as the product and the law evolve; we’ll change the “last updated” date and, for material changes, give notice. Questions or requests: hello@staffhero.com, GroundForm Software LLC, 30 N Gould St, STE R, Sheridan, WY 82801, USA.