Data minimisation in a survey

On this page: minimise, limit, remove, questionnaire, survey Date of last review: 2022-08-22

For a course, a teacher at the faculty of Veterinary Medicine collected data on the health of pets and the pets’ owners. The initial purpose of the survey was to create simply datasets for students to learn about statistics. However, besides for the course, the teacher also wanted to use the collected data for research purposes and share the data with others. In order to do so, the teacher created a new version of the survey that asked for less identifiable information and could be more easily anonymised. Additionally, the new version of the survey informed participants about the legal basis used to process their personal data.

Here, you can find the survey before and after data minimisation:

Note that the new version of the survey:

• minimises the amount of personal data collected:
  • Student number and pet names are not asked in the new version of the survey.
  • Instead of Age, the new version asks the Age category of the owner/caretaker.
  • The survey includes questions on Weight and Height. For data publication, they are used to calculate the Body Mass Index (BMI) and deleted after this calculation.
• contains information about the legal basis used to be able to use (legitimate interest) and publish (consent) the data for purposes other than education.

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Data Privacy Handbook

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