There’s no doubting the benefits and popularity of Survey123. The simple intuitive interface makes it a great tool for collecting data from different user groups and the ability to set surveys as public brings those benefits to citizen and customer engagement.
With any data collected it is vital that the data is properly managed and access to it is controlled appropriately. There are some essential settings to check when you are setting up your survey to limit what can be done with survey records. ArcGIS also supports a great mechanism for presenting the data back to the audience as a read-only feature layer view - while the actual feature layer remains hidden.
So what are these settings and how do you make sure your surveys are well configured? The Esri Software Security and Privacy team has published a really clear and comprehensive whitepaper on Discovering and Limiting Access to Public Survey123 Results. I think this such an important document for anyone creating or managing Survey123 surveys to read that I’m not going to try and summarise it. So please do find those few minutes to read through it’s clear and concise guidelines. Although the guidance focuses on public surveys the considerations apply to internal surveys too.
The document also tells you how to discover the public surveys in your organisation using the ArcGIS Online Security Advisor tool. This should make it easier to audit your existing surveys to double-check they are following best practice.
Keep your data safe and keep those surveys coming in.