Privacy
& Data

The Operator Index is published by Auraqu, Inc., a Delaware corporation, as identified in the Legal Notice. All enquiries regarding the handling of personal information may be addressed to misha@operatorindex.com.

The Operator Index processes personal information for a single defined purpose: the production of a quarterly aggregated research publication on the experience of US multi-unit franchise operators across the major QSR franchisors. The processing is limited to the minimum necessary to carry out and publish that research and to communicate with panel respondents about the issue in which their contribution appears.

Personal information is not used for advertising, profiling, sales, lead generation, credit assessment, or any purpose unrelated to the research publication. Personal information is not sold, licensed, rented, or shared with any franchisor, supplier, or third party in individually identifiable form.

• Contact
  Name, business email address, business telephone number, and franchisor and unit count of the respondent. Recruitment information is sourced exclusively from publicly available business listings and from publicly disclosed Franchise Disclosure Documents (FDDs) on file with the registering states.
• Responses
  Free-form answers given by the respondent to the six-question research instrument published at operatorindex.com/methodology.
• Call metadata
  Date, time, duration, and outcome of each research call, and notes taken by the interviewer during the conversation.
• Not collected
  Audio recordings of calls are not retained. No sensitive personal information (financial account numbers, government identifiers, health information) is collected. No information is sourced from third-party data brokers.

Respondent participation is entirely voluntary. A respondent may decline to participate at any time, during or after the call, without consequence. There is no compensation, and no participating operator is contractually bound by the publication.

Individual respondent information is accessed only by The Operator Index research team. It is not sold, licensed, shared, or otherwise transferred to any franchisor, supplier, investor, data broker, or third party in individually identifiable form.

Aggregated findings — in which no individual respondent is identifiable and every published cell meets the minimum cell-size threshold defined in the methodology — may be published publicly and licensed to institutional research subscribers.

• Contact
  Retained for the duration of the respondent’s participation in the panel and for up to twenty-four months thereafter, to permit delivery of the aggregated issue and subsequent quarterly issues where the respondent has opted to continue.
• Responses
  Retained in individually-linked form only until the aggregated issue in which they contribute is published, after which they are reduced to de-identified records suitable for longitudinal analysis.
• Call notes
  Retained in individually-linked form for ninety days after publication of the relevant issue, then deleted.
• On request
  Any respondent may request early deletion of their personal information at any time by emailing misha@operatorindex.com. Such requests are honoured within thirty days.

Any respondent may, at any time, by emailing misha@operatorindex.com:

• Access
  Request a copy of the personal information we hold about them.
• Correct
  Request correction of inaccurate personal information.
• Delete
  Request deletion of their personal information from our records.
• Opt out
  Decline further contact and have their entry removed from future outreach lists.

Requests are responded to within thirty days. Respondents located in California may exercise the rights set out in the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA, Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.100 et seq.) using the same contact address.

operatorindex.com is a static informational website. It does not set tracking cookies, does not use analytics trackers, and does not embed third-party advertising or social plug-ins. The only network requests made by this site are to Google Fonts for display typography, which is served without personal identifiers under Google’s font-serving privacy terms.

No account registration is offered, no newsletter is operated, and no form on this website collects personal information. Contact with the research team is by email only.