Confidentiality is not sharing information collected from your survey. Only the survey owners, collaborators, or individuals associated with the survey can review the responses; however, they must not share the collected information with anyone outside of the project.
Anonymity is not collecting private, personally identifiable information such as name, address, email address, etc. This also means that the respondent's IP address and/or the participant identities cannot be linked back to individual responses.
How To Make Your Qualtrics Survey Anonymous
There are two types of surveys you can create: Open Access and By Invitation Only.
Open Access surveys can be taken by anyone and are therefore anonymous by default; however, they still collect IP addresses. In some cases, IP addresses are considered identifiable information if they can be linked to an individual.
By Invitation Only surveys are restricted to a panel of individuals you invite and are sent a unique survey link using the Qualtrics survey mailer.
To ensure your surveys are completely anonymous, you should set your surveys to Anonymize Responses, which automatically removes all personally identifiable information, as well as the IP address. This can be accomplished using the following two methods:
Your survey will remain anonymous if using a panel or the Qualtrics survey mailer
Once you set your survey to anonymize responses, all personally identifiable information, as well as the IP address will still be removed from the data responses; however, there is an email history which can be downloaded. Within the email history download, you can still see who (panel member’s name and email address) completed the survey, but there is no way to link the panel member back to his/her response. The Response ID, End Date, and Link are omitted for privacy.
You can collect contact information on an anonymous survey
Sometimes you may have a survey, such as a gift drawing, in which you still need to collect contact information (i.e., name and email address). You need to create two surveys in order to keep that collected information separated from the anonymous survey responses. Survey set up instructions can be found on the Qualtrics website.