Confidential unit record files

When data is confidential, no individuals, households, or businesses can be identified, and no unauthorised people can access the data. This includes where we must or wish to protect the confidentiality of data throughout its life cycle — whenever we collect, use, store, and distribute it.

The terms privacy, security, and confidentiality are often used interchangeably, but each term has a different meaning:. What do statisticians and data analysts mean when they talk about confidentiality? How does identifiable data differ from de-identified or confidentialised information?

Data identifiability is not binary. Data lies on a spectrum with multiple shades of identifiability. This is a primer on how to distinguish different categories of data in the NZ content.

Data that identifies a person without additional information or by linking to information in the public domain. Where an individual can be identified through connecting up information. Personal, identifiable data like this are protected, and should only be released to the public providing we have explicit permission to do so. Postcode De-identified: Data which has had information removed from it to reduce risk of spontaneous recognition likelihood of identifying a person, place or organisation without any effort.

Partially confidentialised: Data which has been modified to protect the confidentiality of respondents while also maintaining the integrity of data. Modification involves applying methods such as top-coding, data swapping, and collapsing categorical variables to the unit records.

Data which has had statistical methods applied to it to protect against disclosing unauthorised information. Statistical methods include suppression, aggregation, perturbation, data swapping, top and bottom coding, etc. These prevent the unauthorised identification of individuals, households, or organisations. This data is publicly available. New Zealand businesses, institutions, and organisations rely on high-quality, timely, and accurate data for planning, research, and information.

Good data helps New Zealand grow and prosper. The New Zealand Data and Information Management Principles mandate that government data and information should be open, readily available, well managed, reasonably priced and reusable unless there are necessary reasons for its protection.

These principles include:. In such cases they should be protected. Much of the data collected in New Zealand is about individual people, households, businesses, and organisations — including sensitive personal and commercial data.

Data gatherers and users depend on the personal and commercial trust and goodwill of the people they collect data from. Maintaining confidentiality is crucial to the New Zealand data system. If you provide data to an unauthorised user, or provide identifiable information without consent, you may be breaking the law. If the information becomes public, the implications are more serious. Principles and legislative requirements underpin the policies, standards, and guidelines for data confidentiality.

The methods and rules are based on legislative requirements and four principles:. Microdata output guide Stats NZ. Data users must comply with relevant legislation. Legislation with specific requirements about keeping data confidential include:. You may also need to comply with other legislative requirements when using specific types of data. For example, the Tax Administration Act sets out requirements for protecting tax data and the Health Information Privacy Code sets out rules for collecting, managing and using health information.

An integral feature of any government data system is that it is underpinned by ethical principles, to ensure responsible data use and prevent harmful outcomes. Respect for people is about recognising the people behind the data and the interests of individuals and groups in how data is used. Protecting confidentiality of data is an important way of showing respect for people. Whenever you release data you must take extra care with data that is personally or commercially sensitive.

Government agencies and other producers of official statistics are also guided by the United Nations Fundamental Principles for Official Statistics:. Protecting personal identifying information and preserving security of any output is emphasised in the Principles for safe and effective use of data and analytics developed by the Government Chief Data Steward and the Privacy Commissioner. Other ethical guidelines will be relevant for specific types of research.

It is essential to use confidentiality methods to protect individually identifiable information in microdata. You may also need to use them to protect larger datasets and data outputs. Whenever we release data — to the public, a researcher, or any other kind of data user — we must make sure its confidentiality is appropriately protected.

We protect confidentiality by ensuring that details about individual people, households, businesses, or organisations are not identifiable, and cannot be deduced. Details must not be identifiable in the raw data, published statistics, or the data output users create. Often you can release individually identifiable details, where you need to, provided you have received written authorisation from the individual to do so.

Unit record data and summary data — called microdata — is especially likely to be identifiable, as it is records of individual people, households, businesses, or organisations. Statistical data that will be published needs to be organised in a way that prevents any individual details from being identified.

To protect the confidentiality of microdata — and where necessary, larger datasets — you can use one or more of these statistical methods:. Review your confidentiality business rules, methods, and processes regularly — at least every three to five years. You need to ensure that new technology, or the public availability of additional data, has not increased the risk of disclosure.

Introduce new measures for protecting confidentiality if you need to. Even with protection in place, there is always a risk of disclosing identifiable data.

A data breach or disclosure breach happens when data is released that identifies a person, household, business, or organisation. You must acknowledge that there is always a risk of a data breach happening. Perturbation — adding random noise to data — is a widely used data confidentiality method.

Perturbation works by adding a random value to the data, to mask the data. Perturbation is a best-practice method. A count magnitude or value magnitude measures a sum of counts or sum of values relating to the individual data you are protecting. The ACS includes software, applications, and expertise to help users automatically apply confidentiality methods and produce consistent results.

In the NCM method, each individual data record is assigned a uniformly distributed random number. These random numbers are fixed across time, to ensure the same degree of perturbation is applied to the individual over time. For count tables, random numbers generate a new random number for units grouped together in a cell.

This is the basis for fixed random rounding to base 3 FRR3. It ensures the same group of individuals will always be rounded the same way in related tables. This is to disguise small counts. But since all table data are rounded consistently, they are protected against both:. We can protect information in counts tables by random rounding to base 3 RR3.

Any outstanding citations or actions on the drivers license record failure to appear, failure to pay, suspension revocation, etc. Vehicle s are registered out of state or are not registered to the Safe at Home participant. Copy of the old and new Social Security Card. Food Stamps Procedures: The designated mailing address shown on the Safe at Home Authorization ID Card must be accepted in lieu of the participant's confidential address for applicants and recipients of food stamps.

Safe at Home receives the completed cards from the voter, reviews them for accuracy and completeness, and forwards them to the appropriate county elections office. When the county elections office receives a Confidential Voter Registration card, the representative processing the confidential voter registrations should: Remember that Safe at Home participants are automatically considered vote-by-mail voters.

Cancel and remove from any accessible files or databases the confidential voter's old voter registration card and registration information.

Keep participants' active confidential voter registration information off of the statewide database and store the cards in a confidential and secure location. Provide and insert an additional return envelope with each mailed absentee ballot or otherwise protect the participant's confidential address information from being displayed on the vote-by-mail ballot return envelope. Make sure the participant completes the Confidential Voter Registration Affidavit provided by the Safe at Home program.

Immediately notify Safe at Home via mail or fax of the participant's registration and provide a copy of the Confidential Voter Registration card for the participant's file. When a participant's enrollment is cancelled or the participant moves to another county, you will receive a cancellation letter from the Safe at Home program. Please immediately return the cancelled Confidential Voter Registration cards to the Safe at Home office. Secretary of State Notary Division Agreement Notary information is public; participants should use their best judgment before becoming a notary.

Most self-storage facilities lack on-site security and surveillance systems. Tenants and sometimes non-tenants are allowed to come and go as they please, making units prime targets for criminals. Who wants to crawl around in a dark, damp storage unit searching for records?

How many times has a member of your staff taken time out of their day to sift through boxes within a self-storage unit looking for a particular record? Self-storage units are not protected from fires, floods, or insect infestations. Self-storage units are dark, damp, and prone to mold growth.

With Record Storage Systems, we offer turnkey records management with the additional benefit of a risk management solution that covers you in the event of a disaster.