Putting People on the Map Protecting Confidentiality with Linked Social-Spatial Data (2007) / Chapter Skim
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2 Legal, Ethical, and Statistical Issues in Protecting Confidentiality
2 Legal, Ethical, and Statistical Issues in Protecting Confidentiality
Pages 26-41
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From page 26... ...
Most U.S. research organizations, whether in universities, commercial firms, or government agencies, have internal safeguards to help guide data collectors and data users in ethical and legal research practices.
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From page 27... ...
Few IRBs are actively involved in questions about data sharing over the life of a research project, and fewer still have expertise in the new areas of linked socialspatial data discussed in this report. Although not all research is explicitly subject to the regulations that require IRB review, most academic institutions now require IRB review for all human subjects research undertaken by their students, faculty, and staff.
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From page 28... ...
IRB approval and "institutional concurrence" are similar, though the latter often encompasses financial and legal requirements of grants not generally covered by IRBs. less of their funding sources, undergo general human subjects protection training when such issues are pertinent to their work or their supervisory roles.
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From page 29... ...
One of these challenges is that major sources of fine-grained spatial data, such as commercial firms and such government agencies as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and National Oce
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From page 30... ...
For example, NASA's policy directive on the protection of human research subjects offers useful guidance for producers and users of linked spatial-social data, although it is clearly targeted at biomedical research associated with space flight.3 The difference in traditions between NASA and NOAA and other research agencies may be due in part to the fact that spatial data in and of themselves are not usually considered private. Although aerial photography can reveal potentially identifiable features of individuals and lead to harm, legal privacy protections do not apply to observations from navigable airspace (see Appendix A)
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From page 31... ...
Training programs funded by the NIH also require ethics components, but it is not at all certain that the coverage provided or required by these programs goes beyond general ethical issues to deeper consideration of ethics in social science research, let alone in the context of social-spatial linkages.4 Professional data collection and stewardship organizations, as noted above, typically have mandatory standards and training. Nonetheless, there is no evidence that any of these organizations are systematically considering the issue of spatial data linked to survey or other social survey data in their training and certification processes.
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From page 32... ...
U.S. law provides little guidance for researchers and the holders of datasets except for the rules imposed by universities and research sponsors regarding methods by which researchers may gain access to enhanced and detailed social data linked to location data in ways that both meet their research needs and protect the rights of human subjects.
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From page 33... ...
. In addition, as noted above, linked social and spatial data raise particularly challenging ethical issues because the very spatial precision of these data is their virtue, and, thus, aggregating or masking spatial identifiers to protect confidentiality can greatly reduce their scientific value and utility.
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From page 34... ...
Also, secondary analysts of data, including those engaged in data linking, have the ethical obligation to honor agreements made to research participants as part of the initial data collection. However, the practices of IRBs for reviewing proposed secondary data analyses vary across institutions, which may require review of proposals for secondary data analysis or defer authority to third-party data providers that have protocols for approving use.11 Data stewardship -- the practices of providing or restricting the access of secondary analysts to original or transformed data -- entails similar ethical obligations.
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From page 35... ...
These three principles together provide a framework for both facilitating social and spatial research and doing so in an ethically responsible and sensitive way. For primary researchers, secondary analysts, and data stewards, the major ethical issues concern the sensitivity of the topics of research; maintaining confidentiality and obtaining informed consent; considerations of benefits to society and to research participants; and risk and risk reduction, particularly the obligation to reduce disclosure risk.
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From page 36... ...
Although these approaches are appropriate for many varieties of data, in cases where there are exact spatial identifiers, virtually every individual is unique, so the disclosure risk is very great. Quantifying Disclosure Risks Methods of estimating the risk of identification disclosure involve estimating population uniqueness and probabilities of identification.
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From page 37... ...
For purposes of disclosure risk assessment, population uniqueness is not a fixed quality; it depends on what released information is known by the secondary data user. For example, most individuals are uniquely identified in populations by the combination of their age, sex, and street address.
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From page 38... ...
For example, when original values of attributes are released, a secondary data user who correctly identifies a record learns the attribute values. Many data disseminators therefore fold the quantification of attribute disclosure risks into the measurement of identification disclosure risks.
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From page 39... ...
For example, data disseminators look at the similarity of point estimates and standard errors of regression coefficients after fitting the same regression on the original data and on the data proposed for release. If the results are considered close -- for example, the confidence intervals for the coefficients obtained from the models largely overlap -- the released data have high quality for that particular analysis.
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From page 40... ...
Furthermore, if spatial identifiers are used as matching variables for linking datasets, altering them can lead to matching errors, which, when numerous, may seriously degrade analyses. Perturbing the spatial information may not reduce disclosure risks sufficiently to maintain confidentiality, especially when the released data include other information that is known by a secondary data user.
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From page 41... ...
No guidelines currently exist for visualizing linked social-spatial data, in published papers or even presentations; but future standards for training and publication contexts should be based on systematic assessment of such risks. In principle, policies for access to data that include spatial identifiers can be improved by evaluating the tradeoff between disclosure risks and data quality.
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