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Use data for a purpose it wasn’t approved for

Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2025 4:52 am
by asimj1
When it comes to small counts, for example, the UK Data Service – like most UK Research Data Centres – has a threshold of 10 – as opposed to the theoretical threshold of three suggested in the above table – to help reduce the risk of re-identification.

Safe researchers
However, while UK Data Service can spain rcs data restrict the outputs released to ensure that sensitive information isn’t made public, they cannot prevent this on their own – Secure Lab users need to ensure they are safe researchers!

Central to this are positive attitudes; if researchers have a positive attitude towards data safety then this will lead to positive behaviours when it comes to using these data.

Some of the most problematic things researchers could do is to:

Share data with somebody who has not been approved to work on the project, even if it’s just a couple of figures.
If the other person hasn’t gone through the safe researcher process then they are not aware of potential disclosure risks and are in breach of both procedures and the legislation.
Researchers are granted access to Secure Lab data for a specific purpose only, and that project will be deemed ‘safe’ (i.e. it will have a valid statistical purpose). Using it for a different purpose is, again, a breach.