The New Data-Induced Issues in Confidentiality and Data Access from the Perspective of Official Statistics

• Activity Number: 168 - Risk analysis and related topics
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 10, 2021 : 10:00 AM to 11:50 AM
• Sponsor: International Statistical Institute
• Author(s): Dominik Rozkrut* and Monika Rozkrut and Wlodzimierz Okrasa
• Companies: Statisitcs Poland and University of Szczecin and Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw
• Keywords: confidentiality and data access; disclosure limitation and risk; new data protection procedures; non-statistical approaches

Abstract

There is growing concern about the risk of the widening gap between the operational capabilities of the tools (techniques and approaches) available to confidentiality researchers, official statistics managers and policy makers, and the challenges posed by new types of data and storage (including data from multiple sources and administrative data), and recent developments in computing power, algorithms and software for record linkage, data sharing and data analytics. Questions that arise in this context are focused on the new data overflow and presented in the first part of the paper. A comprehensive outline of the context, including the issues of basic protection of confidentiality, privacy and access, is a starting point for these considerations. In the second part there is an attempt to define a methodological framework for providing strategies to deal with the above-mentioned challenges and other problems related to the disclosure limitations from an institutional point of view. The main lines of possible research that could be of interest to institutions which are trying to solve similar problems due to the emergence of new types of data will be discussed in conclusion.