Quarterly project update (July 2022)

Hello! 👋

In this update, among others: Data storage chapter online, survey report, synthetic data package, and developing a privacy course.

We have been working hard on all the different deliverables in the project, and slowly the team is expanding to include an even wider variety of expertises (check out the People page). Want to receive the monthly email update? Drop us a message!

🧠 Data Privacy Handbook

In the past quarter, we have:

• Published the Data storage chapter. Feedback after publication is of course very welcome!.
• Worked on chapters “What is personal data?” (nearly finished), “Privacy by Design” (currently on hold),”Data sharing and publishing”, and “Privacy-enhancing techniques”. In the next quarter, we hope to publish at least one but preferably multiple of these chapters online for first public consultation.
• Been rethinking the chapters to reflect the needs of researchers expressed via the survey.
• Been thinking about how to embed the Handbook within the organization and beyond.

🔍 Survey

We have received about 173 responses on the survey from researchers from all Utrecht University faculties. All code and documentation related to the survey can now be found in the dedicated survey repository. For example, we have already written a first preliminary report to share the first results. Besides the survey, we have met one-on-one with about 27 researchers from the survey. In most of these conversations, a privacy officer was present as well.

The next steps are to:

• Process the results from these meetings (i.e. challenges and needs expressed by researchers) in a next version of the report.
• Summarize findings for each faculty separately.
• Formulate action points based on the results that can be tackled within the Data Privacy Project and beyond.

🛠️ Use Cases

Use cases are research projects with a 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.

So far, we have:

• Connected with SURF to explore existing and new tools to work with personal data in research.
• Created an overview of audio transcription tools. At Utrecht University, more communication is now set up as well on which tool UU researchers should use for this purpose.
• Created a repository with an overview of existing R and Python packages for deidentifying and synthesizing data.
• Started developing a Python package for synthesizing data. It will be presented at the Open Science Festival on September 1st.

In the next quarter, we hope to continue this work and create more practical guidelines as to which solutions should be used in which scenarios.

💪 Dissemination

The past quarter has revolved all around the start of the online course “Privacy basics for researchers”. This is a huge team effort which is already making great progress: first versions of the Introduction, Definitions, and Legal bases modules are already in the online Ulearning platform. In the next quarter, we hope to get expert feedback and finish the first few modules of the course.

Besides the course, we are also starting to think about other ways to implement our work into the organization and combine efforts across parts of the organization.

❓ Questions?

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