Privacy
& Data

The data controller responsible for personal data processed in connection with Brand Partner Index, within the meaning of Article 4(7) GDPR, is Auraqu, Inc., a Delaware corporation, as identified in the Legal Notice. Although the controller is established outside the European Economic Area, the GDPR applies extraterritorially to the processing of personal data of respondents located in the EEA pursuant to Art. 3(2) GDPR, and all rights and obligations set out below apply in full. All enquiries regarding the processing of personal data may be addressed to company@brandpartnerindex.com.

Brand Partner Index processes personal data for a single defined purpose: the production of a quarterly aggregated research publication on the experience of European fashion brands across the major e-commerce platforms. The processing is limited to the minimum necessary to carry out and publish that research and to communicate with panel respondents about the issue in which their contribution appears.

Personal data is not used for advertising, profiling, sales, lead generation, credit assessment, or any purpose unrelated to the research publication.

• Contact
  Name, business email address, business telephone number, and employer (brand) of the respondent. Recruitment data is sourced exclusively from publicly available business listings and legally-required commercial disclosures (e.g. Impressum pages).
• Responses
  Free-form answers given by the respondent to the eight-question research instrument published at brandpartnerindex.com/methodology.
• Call metadata
  Date, time, duration, and outcome of each research call, and notes taken by the interviewer during the conversation.
• Not collected
  Audio recordings of calls are not retained. No special-category data (Art. 9 GDPR) is collected. No data is sourced from third-party data brokers.

Processing is carried out on the basis of legitimate interests pursuant to Article 6(1)(f) GDPR — specifically the interest in producing public-interest economic research on the functioning of European e-commerce markets — balanced against the rights and freedoms of respondents.

Respondent participation is voluntary. A respondent may decline to participate at any time, during or after the call, without consequence. Consent is obtained verbally at the outset of each call for the use of AI-assisted note-taking software during the conversation.

Individual respondent data is accessed only by the Brand Partner Index research team. It is not sold, licensed, shared, disclosed, or otherwise transferred to any platform, marketplace, retailer, investor, data broker, or third party in individually identifiable form.

Aggregated findings — in which no individual respondent is identifiable and every published cell meets the minimum cell-size threshold defined in the methodology — may be published publicly and licensed to researchers and industry observers.

Data processors used in the course of the research (telecommunications, email, AI note-taking, cloud storage) are engaged under Art. 28 GDPR data-processing agreements and operate within the European Economic Area wherever possible. Where processing outside the EEA is necessary, it is carried out under the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.

• Contact
  Retained for the duration of the respondent’s participation in the panel and for up to twenty-four months thereafter, to permit delivery of the aggregated issue and subsequent quarterly issues where the respondent has opted to continue.
• Responses
  Retained in individually-linked form only until the aggregated issue in which they contribute is published, after which they are reduced to de-identified records suitable for longitudinal analysis.
• Call notes
  Retained in individually-linked form for ninety days after publication of the relevant issue, then deleted.
• On request
  Any respondent may request early deletion of their personal data at any time by emailing company@brandpartnerindex.com. Such requests are honoured within thirty days.

Under the GDPR, each respondent has the following rights with respect to their personal data:

• Access
  The right to obtain confirmation of whether personal data concerning the respondent is being processed and a copy of such data (Art. 15 GDPR).
• Rectification
  The right to have inaccurate personal data corrected (Art. 16 GDPR).
• Erasure
  The right to have personal data deleted (Art. 17 GDPR).
• Restriction
  The right to restrict processing under certain circumstances (Art. 18 GDPR).
• Portability
  The right to receive personal data in a structured, commonly-used, machine-readable format (Art. 20 GDPR).
• Objection
  The right to object to processing based on legitimate interests (Art. 21 GDPR), in which case processing will cease unless the research team can demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds that override the respondent’s interests, rights, and freedoms.
• Complaint
  The right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority (Art. 77 GDPR) — ordinarily the data protection authority of the respondent’s member state of residence, place of work, or place of the alleged infringement.

All rights may be exercised by contacting company@brandpartnerindex.com. Responses are provided within thirty days.

Brand Partner Index does not carry out automated decision-making, including profiling, that produces legal or similarly significant effects on respondents within the meaning of Art. 22 GDPR. AI note-taking software assists a human interviewer but does not itself make decisions affecting respondents.

brandpartnerindex.com is a static informational website. It does not set tracking cookies, does not use analytics trackers, and does not embed third-party advertising or social plug-ins. The only network requests made by this site are to Google Fonts for display typography, which is used without personal identifiers under Google’s font-serving privacy terms.

No account registration is offered, no newsletter is operated, and no form on this website collects personal data. Contact with the research team is by email only.