Grant award aims to protect confidentiality in survey microdata

As the amount of data that we provide to organisations consistently increases, so too does our concern regarding how safely this data is stored and used. There is often a demand for access to highly detailed data to conduct cutting edge research, but this conflicts with the needs of data-holding organisations to protect confidentiality.

Statistics Disclosure Control

One approach is to restrict access to data but this limits researcher’s access. An alternative called Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC) is to make minor alterations data to protect confidentiality. The project will investigate the use of synthetic data as an SDC method, something currently not done in the UK.

The synthetic data will have statistical properties similar to those present in the original and so users should be able to draw similar conclusions to those that would have been obtained from the original data while at the same time protecting confidentiality.