The anatomy of disclosure risk in a world of linked population data (WP4)

Creating Research Data Policy in a Changing Data Landscape: A Workshop held on 16th January 2018 in London

The world of data is changing rapidly; opportunities and challenges abound. New legislation, particularly the General Data Protection Regulation and the UK’s Digital Economy Act, new technologies which produce new forms of data, new methodologies for data capture and analysis and a changing policy environment are all driving change. At the same time, there is a pressing need to address big questions in science and society which demand effective interdisciplinary research access to large and complex data.

This workshop, convened by Mark Elliot and David Martin from the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM), is an output of the deliberation on a wide range of topics that have arisen from the NCRM workpackage. In working on the sometimes very technical questions, we came to realise that it is impossible to arrive at well-formed conclusions on these types of topic without considering the wider context in which such technical advances are happening. In short, functional answers to these questions will be necessarily interdisciplinary and so for this workshop we have assembled a set of speakers each of whom will cover some of the important perspectives.

The workshop considered these drivers, how they are changing the data landscape and how one might create and implement data policies and standards in such a changing context. What is research data – how will we be accessing and using it in 5, 10 years’ time? What should organisational level data policies look like? How do you identify what your data needs are? How do you plan data resources? What does leadership in this area look like? Who needs to be involved in the conversation?
Please click on the presentation titles to download the slides.

Session I: Changing Legal and Policy Frameworks
How can functional anonymization help us interpret the GDPR’s model of personal data?
Dr Karen McCullagh, Lecturer, School of Law, University of East Anglia
Dr Elaine Mackey, Research Associate, University of Manchester

Policy and process; enabling research with the Digital Economy Act
Jon Wroth-Smith, Statistician, Office for National Statistics

Session II: Changing Data
Data Horizons: Some Thoughts on the Future of Data
Professor Mark Elliot, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester

Streaming web data for social science research
Dr Jonathan Bright, Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute

Session II: Changing Technologies
Ensuring new solutions meet the real challenges: the role of DataSHIELD
Tom Bishop, Senior Data Scientist, MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge

Seeing the big picture – the importance of taking an ‘end-to-end’ view on administrative data linkage
Professor Chris Dibben, Chair in Geography, University of Edinburgh

Privacy engineering: emerging technologies and policy implications
Guy Cohen, Privitar