Privacy Protective Research: Facilitating Ethically Responsible Access to Administrative Data

Jules Polonetsky, CEO, Future of Privacy Forum, Omer Tene, Senior Fellow, Future of Privacy Forum, and Daniel Goroff, Vice President and Program Director, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation authored a paper titled Privacy Protective Research: Facilitating Ethically Responsible Access to Administrative Data. This paper will be featured in an upcoming edition of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The authors explain:

This paper provides strategies for organizations to minimize risks of re-identification and privacy violations for individual data subjects. In addition, it suggests privacy and ethical concerns can be most effectively managed by supporting the development of administrative data centers. These institutions will serve as centers of expertise for de-identification, certify researchers, provide state-of-the-art data security, organize ethical review boards and support best practices for cleansing and managing data sets.

In January 2017, Privacy Protective Research was featured at a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded workshop along with other white papers written by researchers and practitioners that will help inform the development of a roadmap identifying what data infrastructures need to be built to ensure that data providers and empirical researchers can best serve national policy needs. The papers were grouped in four topic areas: 1) Privacy and Confidentiality; 2) The Interests of Data Producers; 3) Gaining Access: The Lessons of Experience; and 4) Lessons learned from infrastructure successes in other contexts.