Ensuring your data is encrypted for research
I’ve been chatting with a brilliant IT Consultant (please email me if you’d like the contact details) today who has been advising me on how I can ensure my data is secure during my research and to ensure confidentiality of personal data.
The information gathered will be subject to Data Protection regulations as it constitutes personal data. This legislation confers obligations about how the data is stored and who might have access to it (points 20 and 21 of the BSA’s ethical statement).
To comply with the Data Protection Act 1998, schools are registered with the UK Information Commissioner.I will be liaising with the schools’ Data Protection Coordinator about the project (points 16 and 17 of The Statement).
Under the DPA the data collected will be classed as personal data ie. information about an identifiable living individual. To ensure confidentiality the information will therefore be pseudonymised ie. codes will be added to personal information so that it is only identifiable to myself as the researcher.
There are two types of encryption to consider – storage encryption and information transmission
Data will be stored on an encrypted file system meaning that if no file can be opened by anyone other than the researcher who will be the holder of the encryption key code.
Emails will be encrypted. The mailbox is set up so that only the trusted user can open emails.
The website pages that the research participants will access and complete will be secure and encrypted. If something/someone tries to intercept their network traffic, they won’t be able to make sense of the informtion.