The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has significant implications for academic researchers. The Royal Historical Society recently published a set of guidelines to help researchers navigate the legal requirements around data protection. Dr Katherine Foxhall, RHS Research and Communications Officer explains some of the key factors that researchers in SHAPE subjects should be aware of. … Continued
Category: data protection
Data-driven discrimination: a new challenge for civil society
Data-driven technologies have been a transformative force in society. However, while such innovations are often viewed as a positive development, discriminatory biases embedded in these technologies can serve to compound problems for society’s more vulnerable groups. Having recently published a report on automated discrimination in data-driven systems, Jędrzej Niklas and Seeta Peña Gangadharan explain how algorithms discriminate, why this raises […]
How people feel about what companies do with their data is just as important as what they know about it
The recent revelation that Cambridge Analytica was able to acquire the Facebook data of 50 million people has led to a surge of interest and questions around what companies do with people’s data. Amidst all of this, little attention has been paid to the feelings of those whose data are used, shared, and acted upon. According to Helen Kennedy, more […]
Privacy and Academic Research
This guest blog is courtesy of Marlon Domingus, community lead research data management at Erasmus University Rotterdam. It reflects on their experience of supporting privacy in academic research, providing an infographic as a case study.
It is not easy to make a case against safeguarding privacy in general. As citizens we expect our government and the businesses we purchase services from, to take the necessary measures to protect the data we are willing to share with them, given a specific context.
In the same way citizens, patients, data subjects or any other terms we use for participants in our research, expect their data to be protected by the researcher. If we make privacy the default in our research design, and document this in our data management plan, we can manage the sharing of data post-research more easily. This data sharing helps to contribute to debates in society and enables responsible public-private collaboration.
So, no sensible person objects to safeguarding privacy, a basic right for all. But, this begs the question of HOW? Not only within your own research projects, but also within the collective entity we call the “university”. To paraphrase Robert Maynard Hutchins: ‘a university is not only a series of schools and departments held together by a central heating system’, but also by safeguarding privacy for students, faculty, staff and data subjects. This aspiration can be seen as a moral maxim to:
‘Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.’
— Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)
The infographic provides a helicopter view on implementing privacy in academic research. The images lead to underlying information; the frog perspective of safeguarding privacy yourself.
Privacy and Academic Research
This guest blog is courtesy of by Marlon Domingus, community lead research data management at Erasmus University Rotterdam. It reflects on their experience of supporting privacy in acadmeic research, provising a detailed inforgraphic as a case study.
It is not easy to make a case against safeguarding privacy in general. As citizens we expect our government and the businesses we purchase services from, to take the necessary measures to protect the data we are willing to share with them, given a specific context.
In the same way citizens, patients, data subjects or any other terms we use for participants in our research, expect their data to be protected by the researcher. If we make privacy the default in our research design, and document this in our data management plan, we can manage the sharing of data post-research more easily. This data sharing helps to contribute to debates in society and enables responsible public-private collaboration.
So, no sensible person objects to safeguarding privacy, a basic right for all. But, this begs the question of HOW? Not only within your own research projects, but also within the collective entity we call the “university”. To paraphrase Robert Maynard Hutchins: ‘a university is not only a series of schools and departments held together by a central heating system’, but also by safeguarding privacy for students, faculty, staff and data subjects. This aspiration can be seen as a moral maxim to:
‘Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.’
— Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)
The infographic provides a helicopter view on implementing privacy in academic research. The images lead to underlying information; the frog perspective of safeguarding privacy yourself.
Self-archiving platforms and data verification
There used to be a comedy show on TV that featured a character who described everything as either “brilliant!” or “fantastic!” Isn’t open data, brilliant! Data sharing, brilliant! Expanding ways to facilitate open data and sharing, fantastic! And, you know … Continue reading →