Google privacy control options for Google Forms coming; Know how it can help your surveys

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Google Forms are widely used by students and organizations alike for various surveys and questionnaires. It is a great tool to collect data for research papers and to better understand the employees in an organization. However, many times these forms are also shared outside the intended participant base, which can corrupt the data or its usefulness. Sometimes such forms also fall prey to troll attacks which can also negatively affect the results. To help users gain better control of their Google Forms, the company has announced that it will soon add granular control options when sharing to allow the maker to have better privacy control on their form and protect it from outsider influence.

Announcing the feature in a blog post, Google said, “We're introducing a beta that gives Google Forms creators more granular control over who can respond to their forms via sharing settings”. Earlier, those who created forms had two sharing options available to them in order to restrict responses. These were either to restrict them within their domain (and trusted domains) or make the forms public (anyone with the URL can respond).

Now, with this new option, form creators can limit response access to specific users, groups, or target audiences—similar to how file owners can restrict the sharing of Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, or Sites in Drive.

Using the feature is pretty easy. When creating a Google Form, go through the process of adding the details as usual, and create the survey. Right before publishing it, you can follow the following steps.

1. Click the Publish button.

2. It will open up a new pop-up window which will now show a new section called ‘Responders'.

3. Here, you can manage who can respond to the survey.

4. If you belong to an