Quarterly project update (April 2022)

Hello! 👋

In this update, among others: GDPR chapter online, survey is out, tool overviews and a basic privacy course. Want to receive the (internal) monthly email update? Drop us a message!

We have slowly and steadily been expanding our network to work on all kinds of privacy-related issues. In the past quarter, we have additionally started working together with multipe experts more concretely on several project deliverables (see below).

🧠 Data Privacy Handbook

In the past quarter, we have:

• Published the GDPR chapter. Feedback after publication is of course very welcome!.
• Written a first version of the “Designing a GDPR-compliant research project” chapter. This chapter is written in close collaboration with the university’s Privacy Officers. It will contain a step-by-step approach to design a research project in line with the GDPR and university requirements.

In the next quarter, we aim to:

• Publish the “Designing a GDPR-compliant research project” chapter online.
• Work on new chapters, such as “Data storage”, “Documents and Agreements”, and others.

🔍 Survey

As can be read in the previous news post, the survey has been sent out. The Privacy Statement and a preview of the questions can be found on the Survey page.

We have already received > 100 responses from researchers from all Utrecht University faculties. We will soon start analysing the survey results and writing a report with our findings. Importantly, we will also meet with a number of researchers to talk about their experiences and needs and to pick up questions they may have. The survey and these meetings will help us tailor the project to researchers’ needs, for example to develop clearer guidelines, courses, and tools for handling personal data.

🛠️ Use Cases

Use cases are research projects with a data privacy-related issue that we can help solve in the form of workflows, tools, services, etc. We hope to document these in the Data Privacy Handbook for others to reuse.

We are currently working on the following topics:

• Exploring services that allow for safe analysis of personal data without direct access to the data (Code-to-data solutions).
• Making an overview of tools suitable for transcribing audio data.
• Making an overview of existing deidentification and pseudonymisation tools.
• Diving into the topic of synthetic data.
• Possibly, the survey will lead to additional use cases we can work on from the next quarter onwards.

Is your data privacy issue not in this list? We are still looking for new use cases!

💪 Dissemination

We have started to make plans to develop a basic privacy course for UU researchers. Currently, this work includes deciding on the target audience, learning goals and platform to be used.

Besides the course, in the next quarter, we will look into other dissemination options, such as promoting our findings, developing tutorials for using tooling, further developing existing training materials, etc.

❓ Questions?

Questions or comments about this project? Want to collaborate or provide input? Awesome! Please feel free to drop Neha or Dorien a message via email or Twitter.