Participant data access

Participant records hold personal information: names, emails, profile photos, demographics, recordings, and survey and screener responses. Participant data access lets an admin choose, per teammate, how much of that information their AI tools and API integrations are allowed to read.

What you can control

Access is set field by field, so you can grant exactly what a teammate's tools need and nothing more:

• Name: none, first name only, or full name
• Email
• Profile photo
• Demographics: gender, age, race and ethnicity, education, household income, job title, seniority, company size, and location, each on its own
• Recordings
• Survey responses, screener responses, and transcript text

When you turn a field off, Strella leaves it out of everything that teammate's AI assistant or API key returns.

Data that would reveal a hidden field

Some data reveals a field without containing it, so the same settings cover that data too:

• Filtering by age needs Age. The participants a filter returns show who falls in the age range, so without Age, Strella rejects the request.
• Searching by name follows Name. With first name only, a search matches first names only, so a match never confirms a last name. With name hidden, Strella rejects a name search.
• Quotas need every demographic field. A quota usually names a group, such as "Women 25-34", so with any demographic field off, Strella hides a participant's quota and rejects a change to it through the API.
• A Saved Reel's public share link needs Recordings. Anyone with the link can watch the reel, so without Recordings, Strella hides the link and rejects a request to create one. A link a teammate with access already shared keeps working.

When Strella rejects a request for one of these reasons, the response says which field the teammate's access is missing.

Who manages access

Admins manage participant data access for everyone in the organization, including themselves. A teammate cannot raise their own access, and a non-admin cannot reach these settings at all.

An admin can grant themselves or anyone else full access. To keep that accountable, Strella writes every change to the audit log with who made it, who it applied to, and what it changed. See Audit logs.

The default

Until an admin sets it, teammates can read participant information in full through their AI tools and the API. Restriction is something an admin turns on, not a default a teammate has to lift.

1. Open access settings

   An admin opens MCP access in the Developer section of the organization's account settings.

2. Choose a teammate

   Pick the member whose access you want to change.

3. Set each field

   Turn fields on or off, or set name to first-name-only. Save.

A change to a teammate's own access applies on their next request through the API or an AI assistant. A change to the organization default can take up to a minute to reach the teammates who use it.

API keys

An API key carries its own access, set from its scopes when you create it, independent of any person. A key can be limited to a single field, such as email only or one demographic, so an integration reads only what it needs. See API, MCP & AI assistants to create and scope keys, and the API guide on participant PII access for the field-level scopes.