Preventing prefilled question answers

Question

Hi, a user just tested my survey and said that some of the demographic questions are automatically prefilled (e.g. for the MCQ on gender, open-text for country, etc) even though no one else has used that survey link previously. I'm not seeing this when I'm testing my survey so not sure what to do.

Any tips on preventing this from happening?

Answer 1

Chrome sometimes is so intelligent that it can fill out some fields on its own. Even if nobody wants it to. Because Google knows what is best for your.

SoSci Survey employs some measure to prevent auto-filling of forms, unless you specify an auto-fill-code for a text field. These measures usually work fine, so I can only guess why the fields were pre-filled:

• Possibly the person uses some extra-cool plug-in
• Possibly, Chrome has changed its policy in the latest version (not that I knew)
• Possibly, the person had already done the questionnaire, and then re-started it, using a personalized link from an email, actually seeing the own data