I've always wondered if it's possible to tell who has commissioned a particular survey on YouGov. When you read a question like "Would Boris Johnson make an awesome Prime Minister?" it would be interesting to know whether it's Cameron getting his knickers in a twist, or Milliband sowing the seeds of discord.
One survey I was filling in contained a particularly dull set of questions about mobile phones. One of the survey pages just wouldn't progress, so I took a look at the page's source code.
Right up the top was:
https://surveyfiles.yougov.com/ static/test_helen_UK304287_Samsung_Tracker/CSSfile
Curious. It looks like this was a survey from Samsung. Of course, it's possible that this is Sony's annual "What do people think of Samsung" survey.
Here's another one from Friends Life:
This time, ASDA wants to know about my shopping habits:
Is this a serious problem? Does it affect your responses if you know who has commissioned a survey? Are their competitive advantages to knowing what people in your industry are asking?
6 thoughts on “YouGov Leaking Clients' Information?”
Thanks for spotting this Terence. This is poor practice from the older version of our survey system. In the new mobile-responsive version we'll be obfuscating the filenames of survey assets (js and css) more diligently. Perhaps we can label them all terence-eden-0000NNN.* in your honor?
How delightful 🙂 Looking forward to being able to complete surveys on my phone.
Hi Terence, we're in mid rollout of the new system so you should be able to do more and more surveys on your iPhone. We've got touch support and are making the surveys responsive to the phone orientation even (rotate the phone and the question layout changes). We'll have a new grid layout soon that won't require horizontal scrolling which is key. Anyway, lots of changes. Thanks for the support and for keying us in to any errors.
Cool. Hope it also works on Android. Thanks for your comments.
Yes Android too and even Kindle and Windows Mobile - it's HTML5.
Speaking of things that don't work however, I can't connect with either Twitter or g+ to post on your blog here 🙁
Will attack things with a spanner, thanks 🙂