What "anonymous" actually means for your respondents

A response is stored as three things: a random id, the survey it belongs to, and the answers themselves. There is no field for who submitted it. That is not a policy decision layered on top of the database; it is the shape of the table itself.

What is in the database

Every response row holds an id, the id of the survey it was submitted to, the answers as you typed or picked them, and the time it was submitted. That is the whole record. It carries no name, no email address, no account, no IP address, and no cookie or session identifier of any kind.

The table has been unchanged in this respect since the app's first migration, and a build-time check fails if a future change tries to add an identifying column to it, so this is not a claim that could quietly go stale.

How a response connects to anything else

A response links to exactly one thing: the survey it was submitted to. A survey, separately, can optionally be linked to the account of the person who created it, if they signed in or claimed it. That link describes the survey's owner, not its respondents. Signing in to create a survey, or claiming one afterward, has no effect on how any individual answer to that survey is stored.

Put together, this means the person who created a survey and can read its results has no way to trace any single answer back to the person who gave it. The database simply does not carry the information that a trace would need.

What this does not cover

This describes the response record only. It does not describe every system rifts.to operates, such as security logging or product analytics, which can behave differently and are covered in full in the privacy policy. Where anything there is more specific than what is written here, treat that as the accurate version.

Free text answers are still just text

A free text answer is stored the same way as any other answer: as part of that response's record, with the same random id and the same lack of a respondent field. If a respondent chooses to type their own name into the answer itself, that name is now part of the stored text, because it is the content of what they wrote, not something the system added. That is the one way an answer can carry identifying detail, and it is a choice made by the person typing, not a property of the survey platform.

What to tell your respondents

If you are asking people to answer honestly, you can tell them precisely what is true: their answer is stored with no name, account, or identifying detail attached to it, and nothing in the survey system links it back to them. That is a specific, checkable claim rather than a promise about intent, and it holds regardless of who is running the survey or what it asks, or whether the creator is signed in to an account.