We take privacy and the maintenance of participant anonymity seriously at Prolific.
We require that our researchers do not attempt to identify participants. This means you should not ask participants for personal data that would directly identify them—even if that data isn't accessible to you. For example, you shouldn’t ask participants to sign in to their Google Account.
Below is a list of personal data that, as a rule, you may not collect through Prolific. Please note that this list is not exhaustive - as a general rule, you cannot ask participants for any information that could risk de-anonymizing them.
❌ First and/or last name
❌ Initials
❌ Date of birth
❌ Phone number
❌ Address
❌ 9 digit ZIP code or full UK, Canadian, or Australian postcode
✅ However, you can ask for a 5 digit ZIP code, the first letters of a UK postcode, the first 3 letters of a Canadian postcode, or the first 2 digits of an Australian postcode. Please see our geographic prescreeners for more options.
❌ Social media usernames, or links to social media accounts or posts (e.g. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok etc.)
❌ Gaming usernames (e.g. PlayStation Network ID, Xbox gamertag, Steam ID etc.)
❌ Email Address
✅ However, you can ask for participants' Prolific email address which will look like '[email protected]'.
❌ Employer name and/or address
You should not attempt to re-identify any participant through the data provided by Prolific or any other data available to you (this may even be a criminal offense in certain areas). This also applies to other individuals who aren't directly taking the study, you should not ask for personal information of friends, family, colleagues, or anyone else.
Should you need to contact participants, we have a Prolific messaging and email system in place to ensure anonymity is protected. You can read more about our messaging and email system in this article: How can I contact participants?
We recognize that there may be some specific study types (e.g., deception studies) that request personal information from participants that are then not accessible to or used by the research team. We also recognize that some studies may have approval from the IRB or ethics board to collect personally identifiable information. However, we cannot permit this—our Researcher Terms supersede institutional approval. However, our participants are aware that the collection of personally identifiable information is not permitted, and so we find that they frequently change their behavior or exit the study to contact the researcher or Prolific in these studies. As a result of this, in most cases we unfortunately cannot support studies that require collection of this personal data.