Privacy & Data Use

The Friction Assessment · storiessystems.com/assessment/privacy · Effective July 15, 2026

This page governs the Friction Assessment specifically. Where it promises stricter handling than anything else we publish, this page wins.

Scope. This policy covers your assessment responses, the reading derived from them, your access tokens, retention, deletion and correction, limitations, and sharing. Ordinary use of the rest of our website — marketing pages, analytics, contact forms, cookies, and business correspondence — is governed by our general site privacy policy at storiessystems.com/privacy.

The short version. You can take the assessment and see your complete results without giving us any contact information. What you type is yours: you can view, share read-only, export, and delete it. We don't sell it, advertise with it, enrich it, or quietly hand it to sales. Every message we send is one you specifically asked for. Research use of your answers happens only if you check an unchecked box.

What we collect, and why

Your answers, the reading computed from them, and — only if you provide them — an email and/or phone for delivery, and a name only if you book a call (it's needed for the appointment, not before). Optionally, one free-text sentence (we tell you at the field how it's used). We do not collect names at save, and we never require contact information to show you your results.

Your three kinds of access

Why we can replace one link but never recover the other

Your view link can be replaced if you lose it. We keep a recoverable copy, encrypted, so you can retrieve it from your manage page — it is read-only, so the worst it can do is show someone a reading.

Your manage link cannot be recovered once lost. That is intentional. We never keep a recoverable copy, because that link allows changes to your reading — and a copy we could retrieve is a copy someone else could compel, steal, or mistakenly expose. We store it only as a one-way fingerprint, which means nobody can turn it back into a working link. Not an attacker. Not us.

If you never save an email and lose the manage link, the reading cannot be managed by anyone, including us — by design.

A forwarded view link never grants management, history, or deletion. We associate readings only by your own browser or by an email you saved — never by company, domain, device fingerprint, IP address, your answers, or CRM records.

Retention — honest numbers, no "forever"

Someone else opening your shared view link does not reset your retention clock. If you later become a client, the client relationship is governed by our general privacy policy — we don't silently keep assessment data under a client's name. Result links are private and durable, not permanent.

Deletion: one step from your reading or history. Your links stop working the moment you ask. Deleted data is removed from active systems immediately, complete removal from active systems finishes within 30 days, and it ages out of our database's routine point-in-time backup history within 6 hours. We keep a deliberately short backup window — six hours, not weeks — so that deleting something actually deletes it.

What our CRM sees — two stages, plainly

If you only save or deliver your reading: our systems receive your email/phone, the consent record for that one message, delivery status, a do-not-market tag that blocks any marketing or nurture enrollment, and an opaque reference number used solely to send you your link. They do not receive your signature, scores, zone states, sizing, answers, free text, or any results data. Saving a reading is not an invitation for sales to read it.

If you book a Friction Review: the booking record receives your name and appointment details, plus summary context so the call is useful — your signature, confidence level, and zone states. Your free-text note appears on the call screen only if you checked the box offering it at booking, and is never copied into CRM notes.

Never synced, under either stage: raw answers, free text, feedback you gave about the instrument, event logs, your research preference, any lead score, any value-based tier — none of those exist in our CRM.

Staff can open an identifiable full reading only after you book, when you ask for support, or for a narrowly logged security or defect investigation — least-privilege, logged, and never usable for sales.

Messages — the complete list

1. One email and/or one text with your links, when you request saving or delivery.

2. One booking confirmation and one reminder when you book a review — the reminder has an opt-out at booking.

3. A one-time sign-in link, when you request history access.

That's all of it. No sequences, no check-ins unless a future feature explicitly asks and you explicitly accept, no reclassified "service touches." Every send is backed by a stored, timestamped consent record; technically, our system cannot send without one.

Analytics — the minimum-data model

We record that an assessment was completed, which result type rendered, and when a delivery, export, or deletion was requested. That is the whole list, today. We do not currently record per-question events or drop-off points — if we ever add them, this page changes before the collection starts, not after. Error logs are scrubbed of tokens and personal data. We do not collect: how long you spent on any question, keystrokes, cursor movement, session recordings, heatmaps, copies of your answer choices in analytics, or any third-party identifier. All analytics are first-party. There are no pixels, ad tags, tag managers, or third-party scripts on assessment, result, or history pages, and result pages are excluded from search indexing.

Research — opt-in only

Your results page offers one unchecked box: "Allow my de-identified assessment answers to help improve and validate this instrument." If you leave it unchecked, your answers are never used for research or benchmarking — and nothing about your reading, history, export, or booking changes. If you opt in: only your scored answers, zone results, and non-identifying size bands are eligible, in aggregate, with small-cell suppression. Never eligible, opted-in or not: your free text, written feedback, anything linked to your contact details, event logs, booking notes, or CRM data. Withdraw anytime from your manage link or this page; withdrawal is recorded and honored going forward. We will not publish any peer benchmark until our sampling, exclusions, uncertainty, and representativeness are published alongside it. De-identification reduces risk; we don't pretend it eliminates it.

Feedback about the instrument

The optional fit question and post-review accuracy notes are used to improve the assessment — kept separate from sales reporting, never used for marketing segmentation, never synced to the CRM.

Questions, requests, corrections

Questions, requests, or corrections. Deletion and export requests are honored on the timelines above; you don't have to explain why.