International developments in policy, tools and workflows for sensitive data management

Recent years have seen rapid growth in the demand for sensitive data services in social sciences and related domains. The Five Safes framework and programs such as Data Without Boundaries, the Canadian Research Data Centre Network and the Secure Data Service in the UK have led the way for the development of national and multi-national services for enabling access to sensitive data. These programs do however face challenges associated with their growing success, due to the heavy emphasis on manual processes and principles-based approaches that have been a feature of these sector-leading services. This has resulted in difficulties in managing scalability, process efficiency and data input and output controls to support these services.

In recognition of these challenges, there has been a recent growth in efforts to improve the workflows required for sensitive data management - particularly in workflows that support efficient data processing, integration and release. The presentations in this session will present an overview of a selection of these efforts at two organisations, the UK Data Archive (UKDA) and Australian Data Archive (ADA).

Presentations will include overviews of four projects in development: - The Data Risk Assessment Tool (DRAT) - Ryan Perry, ADA - Machine learning for privacy metadata annotations - Darren Bell, UKDA - ADA - Automating anonymisation processing using R and SDC-Micro - Steve McEachern, ADA - UKDA - Using DDI-CDI for sensitive data integration - Deirdre Lungley, UKDA

The session will conclude with a discussion among the panel and audience on future tools development requirements, and possible opportunities for collaboration and joint development within the community of social science data archives and sensitive data service providers.