Eatpol Tester Terms & Conditions

These Tester Terms & Conditions ("Terms") govern your participation in the Eatpol tester panel and your use of the Eatpol app, website features made available to testers, and related services (together, the "Platform").

By creating an account, joining a study, or otherwise using the Platform as a tester, you agree to these Terms.

If you do not agree to these Terms, you must not create an account or participate in any Eatpol study.

1. Who we are

The Platform is operated by Eatpol B.V., Bronland 10, Wageningen, 6708WH, The Netherlands ("Eatpol", "we", "us", or "our").

For privacy-related questions, you can contact us at: info@eatpol.com

2. What Eatpol does

Eatpol operates a consumer testing panel through which testers may be invited to participate in food and product-related studies, including surveys, interviews, at-home product use tasks, and, in some studies, video submissions.

Participation is voluntary. Creating an account does not guarantee that you will be invited to any study or selected for any specific study.

3. Eligibility

To use the Platform as a tester, you represent and warrant that:

• you are at least the minimum age required in your country or as stated in the app at sign-up;
• the information you provide is accurate and kept reasonably up to date;
• you will use the Platform only for lawful purposes and in accordance with these Terms;
• you will participate only in your own name and not on behalf of another person;
• you will not create multiple accounts for the purpose of obtaining multiple rewards or otherwise abusing the panel.

Eatpol may suspend, restrict, or terminate accounts that violate these Terms or undermine the integrity of the panel.

4. Tester account

To participate, you may be asked to provide account and profile information, including your name, email address, age range, gender, dietary preferences, city/country, and, where relevant, your postal address or phone number.

You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your login credentials and for all activity conducted through your account, except to the extent caused by Eatpol's own failure to maintain appropriate security.

You must notify Eatpol promptly if you believe your account has been accessed without authorization.

5. Studies and participation

5.1 Invitations

Eatpol may invite you to studies based on your profile, screening answers, prior participation, location, or other panel-related criteria.

5.2 No obligation to participate

You are not required to accept any invitation. Eatpol is not required to invite you to any minimum number of studies.

5.3 Screening

Some studies include screening questions. Completing screening questions does not guarantee selection.

5.4 Study conduct

If you join a study, you agree to:

• follow the instructions provided in the app or by Eatpol;
• provide honest and genuine responses;
• not submit content that is false, misleading, unlawful, abusive, or infringing;
• not share unreleased products, study materials, study questions, or confidential information with third parties;
• not allow another person to complete the study in your place.

5.5 At-home tasks and product use

Where a study involves food or product samples:

• you must read and follow all instructions provided;
• you must not consume or use a product if you believe it may be unsafe for you;
• you must take reasonable care in handling, storing, and using the product after delivery.

Eatpol organizes consumer studies but does not manufacture the tested products. Product-specific information will be provided where applicable.

5.6 Daily polls and other panel activities

As part of the Eatpol tester panel, you may from time to time be invited to answer short in-app questions, polls, surveys or similar panel activities, whether or not they relate to a live study. These activities help us understand consumer preferences, improve our testing methods, develop benchmark data and decide what to test next.

You are responsible for ensuring that any answers you provide are truthful, accurate and do not intentionally include personal data that is not needed for the question.

6. Interviews, recordings, and video submissions

Some studies may involve:

• spoken interviews with an AI interviewer;
• audio recording;
• transcript generation;
• short participant-recorded videos;
• AI-assisted analysis.

Where a study includes recordings or video, you will be informed in the app before participating.

You acknowledge that, during open-ended interviews, you may choose to disclose information that Eatpol did not specifically ask for. You should avoid sharing unnecessary personal information about yourself or other people.

If a study asks you to record video:

• you must record only yourself unless the study instructions expressly permit otherwise;
• you should avoid filming other people, documents, addresses, or unrelated background details;
• where instructed, you should film yourself facing the front camera, since face masking may work less reliably if you record from a side angle or under poor conditions.

If a study involves video, Eatpol applies face masking and other reasonable technical and organisational measures designed to reduce the risk that you are directly identified by a client. However, face masking is automated and is not 100% accurate in every case. In some situations, including certain recording angles, lighting conditions or movement, a client reviewer may occasionally see unmasked frames of your face in a study video.

Where participant videos are made available to clients, they are made available through controlled in-platform viewing access rather than unrestricted download. Eatpol does not provide clients with your direct contact details as part of ordinary study outputs.

7. AI interaction and transparency

Certain studies use AI systems, including an AI interviewer and AI-supported analysis tools. Where you are interacting directly with an AI system, Eatpol will inform you of that fact in the app or study flow.

Eatpol does not use participant videos for facial recognition or to identify you as an individual. Eatpol does not create facial templates for that purpose and does not compare one participant's face to another for identity recognition.

Your answers may be combined with other participants' answers to create de-identified example profiles ("personas") that the study team may explore with AI. A persona is not your profile and does not show your name or contact details. You will see this explained on the consent screen before you start.

8. Rewards and credits

8.1 Earning credits

You may earn credits, points, vouchers, or similar rewards for eligible participation, as explained in the app or study materials.

8.2 No cash equivalent unless stated

Unless expressly stated otherwise, credits have no cash value and cannot be transferred, sold, pledged, or exchanged outside the Platform.

8.3 Conditions for reward

Eatpol may withhold or reverse rewards where:

• a study was not completed in accordance with instructions;
• multiple accounts were used improperly;
• fraudulent, abusive, or manipulative behavior is detected;
• responses appear fabricated, automated, duplicated, or otherwise unreliable.

8.4 Payment provider

Where rewards are redeemed through an external reward or payment provider, additional provider terms may apply to the redemption process.

9. Confidentiality and unreleased products

You may receive access to confidential study materials, including unreleased products, product concepts, packaging, questions, or instructions.

You agree:

• to keep such materials strictly confidential;
• not to disclose, photograph, post, discuss, review, or share them with any third party;
• not to use them for any purpose other than the relevant Eatpol study;
• to follow any additional confidentiality instructions given in the app.

This confidentiality obligation survives the end of your participation.

10. Your content and licence to Eatpol

10.1 Your ownership

As between you and Eatpol, you retain any rights you may have in content you personally create and submit, subject to the licence below.

10.2 Licence to Eatpol

By participating in a study or panel activity, you grant Eatpol a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence, for the duration of applicable legal protection, to host, store, process and use the content and responses you submit through the platform for the purposes described in these Terms and the Tester Privacy Policy.

This includes, as applicable:

• operating and administering studies and tester-panel activities;
• producing study results and reports for the relevant client;
• combining study answers or daily poll answers into aggregated statistics, benchmarks and insight materials that do not identify you individually; and
• using those aggregated statistics, benchmarks and insights for Eatpol's product development, research, publications, sales materials and marketing.

Eatpol will not use your study videos to train AI models under this Section 10 unless you separately opt in under Section 11.

Eatpol will not use your study videos in its marketing under this Section 10 unless you separately opt in under Section 12.

This licence does not give Eatpol the right to use your identity for advertising or endorsements without separate permission.

11. Optional consent for AI training on your videos

For some video-based studies, Eatpol may ask you in the app, before you record a video, whether you want to separately opt in to an additional use of that recording for AI model training.

This opt-in is:

• optional;
• requested separately from your participation in the study;
• not pre-ticked;
• not required to take part in the study; and
• not required to receive any study reward you are otherwise entitled to.

If you opt in, you agree that Eatpol may use the relevant recording, and related study labels or annotations connected with that recording, to develop, train, test and improve AI models and related technology used to analyse consumer behaviour and consumer-product interactions, such as activities involved in preparing, handling or using products.

This training is for computer-vision models that recognise consumer actions in video, such as opening a pack, pouring, taking a bite, chewing or taking a sip. Your interview transcripts and survey answers are not used for this training.

For this optional AI training purpose, Eatpol uses the masked version of the relevant video rather than the raw source video. However, face masking is automated and is not 100% accurate in every case. In some situations, including certain recording angles, lighting conditions or movement, the masked version may still contain occasional unmasked frames or other imperfect masking. This training use therefore still involves personal data.

A video is used for this training only if you have opted in and the client that commissioned the study has also agreed. Opting in therefore does not guarantee that your video will be used. Training runs on Eatpol's own infrastructure in the EU, and your videos are not sent to an external AI model provider for training.

This optional AI training consent does not cover emotion recognition for identifying or inferring your emotional state unless Eatpol expressly asks for that separately.

Eatpol may use models trained through this optional programme in its internal tools and in commercial products or services provided to business customers.

You can withdraw this optional consent at any time in the app for future use. Withdrawal does not affect processing carried out before withdrawal. After withdrawal, Eatpol will stop using the relevant video and related labels or annotations for any future training runs and will remove them from future training datasets. If your recording has already been used to train a model before you withdraw consent, Eatpol may not be able to reverse that completed training or remove your recording's contribution from model weights already created. Models already trained are not retrained or untrained.

12. Optional consent for marketing use of your videos

For some video-based studies, Eatpol may ask you in the app, before you record a video, whether you want to separately opt in to the use of face-masked clips from that recording in Eatpol's own marketing.

This opt-in is:

• optional;
• requested separately from your participation in the study and from the AI-training opt-in in Section 11;
• not pre-ticked;
• not required to take part in the study; and
• not required to receive any study reward you are otherwise entitled to.

If you opt in, you agree that Eatpol may select short clips or still images from your video that show you testing, preparing or using the product, edit them (for example by trimming, cropping, adding captions, subtitles, graphics or music, or blurring backgrounds), and publish them in Eatpol's own marketing, including on LinkedIn and other social media, Eatpol's website, case studies, sales presentations, newsletters and events. By opting in, you also give Eatpol permission to use your image and likeness as shown in those clips for the marketing purposes described in this Section 12.

For this marketing use, Eatpol will:

• use only the face-masked version of your video;
• not show your name, username, contact details or location;
• remove your original voice unless you separately agree to its use;
• blur or crop identifying items in your surroundings where Eatpol notices them;
• not present you as personally endorsing a brand or product; and
• not sell or license your clips to third parties for their own advertising.

A clip is used only if you have opted in and the client that commissioned the study has approved the use of its product in Eatpol's marketing. Opting in therefore does not guarantee that your video will be used.

Marketing content is public. Face masking is automated and not 100% accurate, so occasional unmasked frames may appear, and people who know you may recognise you from, for example, your hands, clothing, voice or home. This use therefore involves personal data.

Eatpol may use your clips for up to 3 years from the recording date. You can withdraw this optional consent at any time in the app or by emailing info@eatpol.com. Withdrawal does not affect use before withdrawal. After withdrawal, Eatpol will stop any new use immediately and will remove your clips from channels it controls, such as its website, its own social media posts and current sales materials, as soon as reasonably practicable and in any event within 30 days. Eatpol cannot recall copies that others have already shared, reposted or downloaded, or printed materials already distributed.

No extra payment applies for this consent unless the study states otherwise.

13. Prohibited conduct

You must not:

• create fake, duplicate, or misleading accounts;
• impersonate another person;
• attempt to access another user's account;
• interfere with the operation or security of the Platform;
• scrape, copy, reverse engineer, or misuse the app or its contents;
• upload malware or harmful code;
• use bots, scripts, or automation to participate in studies or obtain rewards;
• attempt to identify clients, unreleased products, or other participants from study materials.

14. Suspension and termination

Eatpol may suspend or terminate your account, or limit your participation, if:

• you breach these Terms;
• your conduct creates legal, security, fraud, or quality risks;
• Eatpol reasonably believes the integrity of the panel is affected;
• Eatpol stops operating the tester panel or materially changes its model.

You may stop using the Platform and delete your account at any time.

Termination does not affect:

• accrued confidentiality obligations;
• reward decisions already under review;
• rights and obligations that by their nature survive termination.

15. Account deletion

You may request deletion through the app or through the deletion request process made available by Eatpol.

Where you delete your account, Eatpol will handle your data in accordance with the Privacy Policy, including deletion of your account-related data and, where applicable, deletion of video materials linked to your account unless retention is required for limited legal or accounting reasons or unless a separate legal basis continues to apply for specific retained records.

16. Availability of the Platform

Eatpol does not guarantee that the Platform will always be available, uninterrupted, error-free, or suitable for every device or network.

Eatpol may modify, suspend, or discontinue all or part of the Platform from time to time.

17. Disclaimers

The Platform and tester participation opportunities are provided on an "as available" basis.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Eatpol does not guarantee:

• selection for any study;
• any minimum amount of rewards;
• uninterrupted app functionality;
• that every study will remain available once posted.

Nothing in these Terms excludes rights that cannot lawfully be excluded.

18. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law:

• Eatpol shall not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential loss;
• Eatpol shall not be liable for loss of opportunity, loss of data not caused by Eatpol's own breach, loss of income, or reputational harm arising from ordinary use of the Platform;
• Eatpol's aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with these Terms shall be limited to the greater of: (a) EUR 100; or (b) the total rewards redeemed by you through the Platform in the 12 months preceding the event giving rise to the claim.

This limitation does not apply to fraud, wilful misconduct, death or personal injury to the extent such limitation is prohibited, or any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

19. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you by appropriate means, such as in the app or by email.

The latest version will be the version made available in the app or on the relevant Eatpol page. Your continued use of the platform after the effective date of updated Terms means you accept the updated contractual terms to the extent permitted by law. However, where a particular use of your personal data requires your consent under applicable law, Eatpol will ask for that consent separately and your continued use alone will not be treated as giving that consent.

20. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Netherlands.

If you are acting as a consumer, nothing in these Terms limits any mandatory rights you may have under applicable consumer law, including any right you may have to bring proceedings before the courts that are competent under mandatory law.

21. Contact

Questions about these Terms may be sent to: info@eatpol.com