Check a survey for identifying questions
Paste a Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, SurveyMonkey or Typeform survey and see which questions and settings could identify the people answering. Nothing you paste is kept or sent.
- Anyone running an employee survey
- 5 min read
- Updated Oct 23, 2026
A survey can be encrypted end to end and still give people away, if it asks for their employee ID or splits them into groups of two. These checks catch that before you send it.
Most surveys that out people don't do it through the software. They do it through the questions: a name field nobody removed, a team, an office and a tenure band that together leave one person in the box, or a comment box that asks for "a specific example". InviziPoll checks for these in three places, with the same rules everywhere.
#Where the checks run
- The free anonymous survey checker. Paste the survey you're about to send from Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, SurveyMonkey, Typeform or anywhere else, and press check. No account needed.
- After you import questions. Each imported question is checked in the preview. See Importing questions from another tool.
- In the poll builder. On the Demographics and Review steps, next to the Anonymity Coach.
The checks are free on every plan and never block anything: not an import, not publishing. You decide what to change.
#What it looks for
Questions that ask who someone is. A name, an email address, an employee or badge number, a phone number and similar. This is the one that matters most: anyone who sees the answer knows who gave it, so people either skip it or stop trusting the rest of the survey. In an import or the builder, the question gets a Remove this question button.
Questions that ask which group someone is in. Team, department, location, office, tenure, manager, age band, gender, role or level. One on its own is a note. On InviziPoll, tag it as a demographic and results for a group under the minimum size are held back.
Group questions that add up to small groups. Each group question splits people further. The checker multiplies the answer options to show how many groups your questions can create. On the public page you can enter roughly how many people will answer, and when that leaves only a few people per group, the finding moves up to Fix before you send.
Free text that invites a story. A comment box asking for an incident, an example, "describe a time" or a name. Details like these are how a writer gets recognised, even with no name on the answer. Ask about the pattern instead of the incident.
Free text people have to fill in. A required comment box pushes people to write something they'd rather not.
Free text at all. Just a reminder that the way someone writes can give them away. On InviziPoll, respondents can also send topics instead of their words.
Extra checks on a paste
A pasted form page also carries the survey tool's own notices, and those say how it's set up. The public checker reads them for:
- A form that records names. Microsoft Forms prints a line saying the owner will see your name and email address.
- A form that collects an email. Google Forms shows an email field or a line about recording your email.
- A signed-in account shown on the form, and file upload questions, which can carry names in the file.
A paste can't show everything, like whether a link is personal to each person. So when the checker recognises the tool, it adds a short list of Settings a paste can't show to check in that tool yourself.
#How findings are grouped
On the public checker, findings sit under three headings:
- Fix before you send. Something that identifies people outright, like a question asking for an employee ID or a form that records names.
- Worth a look. Things that narrow people down or invite detail, like several group questions or a comment box asking for an example.
- Good to know. Lower-risk notes, like a single group question or a comment box.
Each finding says why it matters and what to do about it.
#"Nothing found" isn't "anonymous"
If the checker finds nothing, it says so and stops there. It never tells you a survey is anonymous, because a paste can't show how your survey tool stores answers or who can see them. Work through the settings it lists.
#What happens to what you paste
Nothing leaves your browser. The check runs on the page itself: no model reads it, and the text isn't sent to us, stored, or carried over when you sign up. If you go on to import the survey, you paste it again after signing up. We count that a check ran, how many findings it had and which survey tool the paste looked like, never the text or which question matched.
#FAQ
No. It's a fixed set of rules that runs in your browser, so it's free and instant.
Not on the public page. It's paste only. Inside InviziPoll, import takes files too, and runs the same checks.
Keep it if you need it. Nothing is blocked. For a group question, tag it as a demographic in the builder so small groups are protected. For an identifying question, ask yourself whether you'd act on it, because the answer is that people will trust the whole survey less.
The rules are English only for now.