Privacy notice

Version 1, 24 September 2026.

Who is responsible

Sami Andaloussi, Lausanne, Switzerland (First Thing is a project, not yet a registered company). Contact: hello@first-thing-research.com.

What we collect

If you take the survey: your answers, including anything you write in the free-text question. If you stop before the end, the answers you gave so far are kept too.
If you choose to: your email address, whether you reserved the founding-member price, asked for new-article emails or agreed to a call, and when you agreed.
If we have a call: short notes of what you told us.
Basic visit statistics, measured without cookies: how far down the page visitors scroll, which buttons they click, how long each survey question takes and where people stop, and which link, post or search engine brought them here. Page statistics do not identify you. If you take the survey, the time spent per question and where you came from are stored with your answers, and so are linked to your email if you leave one.
Our web host, Cloudflare, processes IP addresses to deliver and protect the site. We do not store IP addresses: they are used only briefly, in memory, to limit abuse, and we have not switched on request logging. The survey does not record IP addresses.

All survey questions are optional except the first and the one about which format you would use.

Why, and on what basis

The launch email, new-article emails and the call: your consent. You can withdraw it at any time; this does not affect what was done before.
Survey answers (with or without an email), visit statistics and where you came from: our legitimate interest in understanding what people need and which posts bring them here. You can object to this at any time.
Survey results may be shared in aggregate. Nothing that could identify you is published; free-text answers are quoted only without names and with identifying details removed.

Where it is stored

Survey: our own form, stored in a Cloudflare D1 database located in the European Union. Email list: Brevo (Sendinblue SAS), France, European Union; your address and consents are also recorded in the same EU database as the survey. Website hosting: Cloudflare, Inc. (United States). Visit statistics: our own cookieless measurement, stored in the same EU database. Bot protection: none from a third party; simple checks run on our own server. Calls: by phone or video call; if by video, the invitation names the service. These providers act only on our instructions, under a data processing agreement. Cloudflare is a United States company: where data goes to the United States, it does so under the Swiss–US and EU–US Data Privacy Frameworks. Emails you write to hello@first-thing-research.com pass through Cloudflare and are delivered to a Gmail inbox (Google, United States, also under the Data Privacy Frameworks).

How long

Survey answers: up to 24 months, then deleted or made anonymous.
Your email: until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete it; it is then also removed from your survey answers, which are kept without it. If you use the "this wasn't me" link, the address is deleted at once, in the same way. If you only agreed to a call: your email is deleted 3 months after the call, or 3 months after you agreed if no call takes place.
After you unsubscribe, we keep only a record of your consent and unsubscription, as proof, for 3 years. That record holds a one-way coded fingerprint of your address, not the address itself.
Call notes: 12 months.
Visit statistics: 24 months.
Emails exchanged with us (for example to arrange a call): up to 12 months in our inbox.
Sign-ups flagged as automated (bots): deleted after 30 days.

What we never do

Sell your data, or share it for advertising.

Your rights

You can ask to see, correct or delete your data, receive a copy, restrict or object to its use, and withdraw consent, by writing to hello@first-thing-research.com. You can also complain to the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) or, in the EU, to your national data protection authority.

Age

The survey and the list are for people aged 16 and over.