Privacy and data handling
This page explains what the hosted METER Research application processes and retains during the research preview. It precedes formal legal review; the final wording will be settled before general availability.
The guarantee
Uploaded data and analysis results are not retained after the request completes. Temporary files may be created during request processing and are deleted before the request ends.
Your downloadable scores, result JSON and audit report are created from the analysis response and remain only where you choose to save them.
Feedback
If you send feedback, METER stores the category, the text you submit and any email address you choose to provide. This information is used to improve the research preview and, if requested, to contact you. No questionnaire data or analysis results are attached to feedback.
Product analytics
METER records day-level counts for a small, fixed set of product events, such as a completed demo or a refused analysis. These events cannot contain filenames, column names, questionnaire responses or score values: the event vocabulary is a strict whitelist enforced by the server, so there is no field those values could travel in. METER does not use cookies, device identifiers or session tracking for these events.
Hosting and network infrastructure
The network and hosting services used to deliver the application may process standard connection metadata such as IP addresses, request paths and timestamps under their own policies. METER request paths do not contain questionnaire responses or analysis values.
During the research-preview phase the deployment environment may change, and the provider terminating TLS can technically observe upload payloads rather than metadata alone. For restricted or controlled datasets, do not use this hosted preview.
How the guarantee is implemented
This section describes the deployment as it runs today. It depends on framework versions, parser libraries and hosting, and it may change. The guarantee above does not change with it, and it is the only data-handling claim other pages repeat.
- Uploads above roughly 1 MB, in any format. The web framework buffers the request body to a private temporary file before application code runs, and removes it when the request ends. Smaller uploads are held in memory.
- SPSS and Stata files. Those parsers require a file path rather than a byte stream, so the bytes are written to a temporary file of their own and deleted as soon as parsing finishes, including when parsing fails.
- CSV, TSV, Excel and Parquet below the buffering threshold. Parsed directly from memory.
- Upload-processing paths. Uploaded questionnaire data and analysis outputs are not written to durable application storage. Temporary upload-processing files are deleted as part of request cleanup. Feedback you choose to send, and day-level usage counts, are retained as described below.
Operational limits such as the maximum accepted file size are served by the application and displayed on the upload page, so the figure shown is the figure in force.
Terms of research use
- METER Research is a research preview provided for research use without warranty.
- Research use only: METER has not been validated for individual diagnosis, screening, treatment, eligibility or other consequential decisions.
- Analyses are governed by a versioned capability contract. If a request falls outside the currently supported region, METER may refuse it or limit the outputs returned.
- Relative uncertainty is a within-analysis ordering diagnostic. It is not a confidence interval or credible interval.
- Scores are estimated conditional on the respondents present in a run. Adding or removing respondents changes every score, so scores from separate runs are not comparable.
- You are responsible for ensuring that you have permission to process any data you upload.
- Upload de-identified data only. Files must not contain names, e-mail addresses, free-text comments or other direct identifiers; you are responsible for removing them before upload.
- Terms governing controlled or restricted datasets take precedence over this research preview.
- Please do not use the shared service for load testing, scraping or automated bulk scoring.
Release and citation status
Citation status: pending archival release. No persistent archival citation exists for METER Research yet.
At present, this web preview is the only access route METER offers to external researchers. The Python package, source code and model weights are not publicly distributed.
Who is responsible
This service is operated by METER Research, which is accountable for the processing described on this page and is the point of contact for any question about it: hello@meterresearch.ai.
If your study needs a data-processing agreement, an institutional security review or a written assurance before you may send data to an external service, write to that address before you upload anything. This is a research preview, and no such agreement is in place by default.
Contact
The feedback form on any results page reaches METER Research directly and is the route for bug reports and feature requests. Data-handling concerns are read with priority, and reach the same place as the address above. Nothing about your dataset accompanies a feedback message unless you type it.