Quarterly project update (February 2023)

Hello! 👋

The end of the Data Privacy Project is nearing fast! Here you can read the update of the past 4 months of this project.

🧠 Data Privacy Handbook

In the past quarter, we published:

• the chapter Designing your project.
• a Frequently Asked Privacy Questions page.
• all the remaining sub-sections of the Documents and assessments chapter (consent, privacy scan, DPIA, legitimate interest assessment, transfer impact assessment, agreements).
• a new version of the Tools and Services chapter, with links to tool finders and the tool repository we are working on (see below).
• a first version of Seeking help at Utrecht University.

Feedback after publication is of course very welcome!

In the next and final quarter, we will publish sections on Sharing personal data for reuse (coming soon), Secure computing (performing computations on personal data), risk assessment, pseudonymisation and anonymisation, statistical disclosure control, differential privacy, synthetic data, encryption and data donation.

🔍 Survey

The two reports with the full Results and Recommendations are available and published online. In the past quarter, we have picked up the most frequently asked questions from the survey and one-on-one meetings, and answered them together with the privacy officers and data stewards. The answers to those questions are now published as a separate page in the Data Privacy Handbook.

🛠️ Use Cases and Tools

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. Besides that, we are looking into the different tools that are available for researchers, and developing new ones where needed.

In the past quarter, we:

• Documented a new use case on reusing educational data for research in the Data Privacy Handbook.
• Started creating overviews of existing (mainly open source) tools and software packages to handle personal data in this GitHub repository.
• In collaboration with SURF, organized a seminar “Your secrets are safe with us: Tooling for research with sensitive data” for researchers and support staff on March 21st, 13:00-17:00 (read more here).
• Further developed the AnonymoUUs and Metasynth packages.

In the next and final quarter, we will:

• publish a last use case on pseudonymisation of different types of data.
• work on the quality and user-friendliness of the tool repository.
• archive all tool-related projects for increased findability and reusability.

💪 Dissemination

In the past quarter, we:

• finished a full first draft of the e-learning “Privacy basics for researchers”. In January, we organized a feedback session on this first draft where privacy, data managenemt and ethics experts could provide input. At the moment, we are busy processing all the feedback we received in a new version of the module.
• started up dissemination of the Data Privacy Handbook:
  • The Handbook can now be reached through a simpler URL: https://uu.nl/privacyhandbook/
  • The Handbook is linked from different parts of the RDM website, the Research knowledge base on the UU intranet, and the Turing Way.

In the next and final quarter, we will:

• Finish the e-learning module that can be piloted among researchers.
• Get the Data Privacy Handbook linked from the UU Privacy intranet pages as well.
• Organize feedback sessions with researchers from all UU faculties to promote and improve the Data Privacy Handbook.

❓ Questions?

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