Privacy Policy
Main Street Pulse, an initiative of The Small Business Corner. Last updated: October 2026.
On this page
1. Overview
Main Street Pulse is a survey run by The Small Business Corner ("TSBC," "we," "us"). Business owners answer questions about where their business stands today. We combine those answers into aggregate trend reports, and we may sell or license those aggregate reports to corporate and government partners working to support small businesses.
This policy explains what we collect when you take the survey, how we use it, who we share it with, and the choices and rights you have over your information.
2. What we collect
When you take the Main Street Pulse survey, we collect:
- Business profile fields: industry, annual revenue range, ZIP code, number of employees, and primary customer type, plus your business name (optional).
- Business certification status (optional): whether your business holds certifications such as minority-owned, woman-owned, veteran-owned, or similar. This question is about your business's certification status, not your personal identity, and you may select "prefer not to say."
- Survey responses: your selections across the stage-specific diagnostic questions, plus any short open-text answers you choose to add.
- Email address (optional): after you submit, a pop-up asks if you'd like to share an email to get our monthly Biz Update. You can skip it and your survey is still submitted. If you add one, it is stored in the same record as your survey answers, along with the date and the version of this policy you agreed to.
3. What we don't collect
We do not ask for your personal name, your personal email address, or any government ID number as part of the core survey. The only personal contact information we ever collect is an email address you voluntarily provide afterward, and only if you choose to.
4. How we use it
- To shape what we build. Your answers directly inform which courses, resources, and programs The Small Business Corner builds first.
- To produce aggregate trend reports. We combine responses across many businesses into reports and dashboards, such as "62% of Growth-stage respondents cited X as their biggest constraint," which we may sell or license on a subscription basis to corporate and government partners.
- To send you the Biz Update. If you gave us your email, we use it only to send the monthly Biz Update and occasional Small Business Corner platform news. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe link.
5. How we share it
We may share data in two ways:
| What's shared | Who it's shared with | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Aggregate trend data | Paying corporate and government subscribers | Dashboard access and quarterly reports showing patterns across many respondents, never a single respondent's raw answers. |
| A single anonymized theme | The public, via Community Corner and social channels | A short, unattributed summary like "founders are telling us AI feels like a hiring decision, not a tech one." |
Your email address is never part of what we share. It is kept separate from the trend reports and dashboards we provide to buyers, and we do not sell, rent, or share it with them or with any other third party.
6. What we never do
Your individual answers and business identity are never sold or shared on their own. We do not sell raw, respondent-level survey exports. Every external report or dashboard is built from combined, aggregated responses, never a dataset where your business's individual answers could be isolated and identified.
7. Your consent
Before you can take the survey, you're asked to agree to the data use described above. That consent is required to participate.
One additional, clearly optional checkbox lets you choose whether you'd like to be quoted by name in a future story. Leaving it unchecked doesn't affect your ability to take the survey. At the end of the survey you may also choose to share your email address to receive our monthly Biz Update and platform news. That is optional too.
8. Your rights: GDPR (EU and UK visitors)
Main Street Pulse is built for U.S. small business owners, but if you're accessing it from the UK or EU, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gives you the following rights over any personal data we hold about you:
- Access: ask what data we hold about you.
- Rectification: ask us to correct inaccurate data.
- Erasure: ask us to delete your data ("right to be forgotten").
- Restriction: ask us to limit how we use your data.
- Portability: ask for a copy of your data in a portable format.
- Objection: object to our use of your data, including for aggregate reporting.
To exercise any of these rights, contact us using the details in Section 14. Because our survey responses are built to be aggregated and de-identified quickly, we may not always be able to isolate and remove a single response once it has been folded into a published report. We'll explain what's possible at the time of your request.
9. Your rights: CCPA/CPRA (California)
If you're a California resident, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), as amended by the CPRA, gives you these rights:
- Right to know: what personal information we've collected, used, and shared.
- Right to delete: request deletion of your personal information, subject to certain exceptions.
- Right to opt out of sale or sharing: direct us not to sell or share your personal information. Because our core survey data is aggregated before it's shared commercially, this right primarily applies to the optional email address you may provide.
- Right to non-discrimination: we won't deny you service or treat you differently for exercising any of these rights.
To submit a CCPA request, use the contact details in Section 14.
10. Data retention
We retain individual survey responses for as long as needed to compile them into current and historical trend reporting, and in de-identified, aggregated form after that. If you've provided an email address, we keep it until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete it.
11. Security
We take reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect the information we collect. No method of storage or transmission is completely secure, and we can't guarantee absolute security.
12. Children's privacy
Main Street Pulse is intended for business owners and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18.
13. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as Main Street Pulse evolves. We'll update the "last updated" date above when we do. Material changes to how we use your data will be reflected in the consent language shown before you take the survey.
14. Contact us
Questions about this policy, or requests related to your data (including access, correction, deletion, or opting out), can be sent to connect@thesmallbusinesscorner.com.