Assessing Sensitive Data in the Data Dictionary
Some of the variables that ALGAE produces may be considered too sensitive for researchers to take away from the secure system where data linking is being done. Information governance decisions about which variables should be allowed to be transfered to other computer systems may vary from one cohort project to another.ALGAE is meant to be a generic protocol that could be applied by multiple cohorts. Rather than have its variable set be shaped by the information governance policies of any one cohort, we assume that cohort administrators will engage in a clearing process that filters which variables researchers can take off-site.
Because the protocol produces hundreds of long-named variables in dozens of tables, we thought it would be useful to highlight those tables and variables which may warrant special scrutiny by the information governance bodies that regulate cohort activities. We are not trying to be prescriptive in suggesting that some variables are sensitive and others are not. We are also not saying that an off-site computing environment could not accommodate more sensitive variables. Instead, we simply want to flag variables that may be of particular concern to cohorts in general.
We'd like to draw your attention to the following kinds of variables:
- geocodes: although geocodes are treated by the protocols as just identifiers, in practice, they may contain easting and northing values which can make locations highly identifiable.
- life stage boundaries: ALGAE generates a life stage table that contains the start and end dates of every life stage. Birth dates of cohort members could in theory be derived from the start dates of some life stages.
Fortunately, these variable all happen to be concentrated and limited to a few files. They have the format of:
-
early_life\results\cleaned_address_history\res_early_cleaned_addr[Time Stamp].csv -
early_life\results\life_stage_data\results_early_life_stages[Time Stamp].csv -
later_life\results\cleaned_address_history\res_later_cleaned_addr[Time Stamp].csv -
later_life\results\life_stage_data\results_later_life_stages[Time Stamp].csv
If you think they're too sensitive for them to be used in another analysis environment, just delete the files.