Data Confidentiality Policy - Ottawa Data for Good

Data Confidentiality

Protecting Personal Data

Data privacy is central to all D4G data analysis engagements. We understand the importance of protecting the confidentiality of your intellectual property, data assets and the identities of all parties interacting with your organization. To this end, we require that personally identifying information be anonymized or excluded completely from any copies of the data before they are made available to our general population of analysts. This can be achieved in a few ways. You as the client can ‘cleanse’ the data before passing it along to us for analysis, or where technical constraints make this impractical, our Data Ambassador will work with you at your premises using encrypted media to render the publishable version of the data set.

Our Commitment

The data is owned by the Organization that D4GO is working with, and it is the responsibility of the Organization to ensure that they are comfortable with any data released to D4GO.

The D4GO Data Ambassador will work with the Organization to explain possible confidentiality concerns of any data set that may be released, and suggest alternatives, trade-offs, etc.

The D4GO Data Ambassador will not release to the larger D4GO membership any data set that the Organization has not agreed to in writing.

Although D4GO expects members to treat the data in a respectful manner, D4GO has no formal agreements in place that guarantee the privacy of data sets or resulting outputs.

Our Expectations

All data sets and supporting project documentation received from the Organization will posted to the Basecamp (or other similar) collaboration site, where access is restricted to D4GO members who have indicated an interest in contributing to the project, using individual logon ids and passwords.

This site exists for the duration of the project, after which time it is archived and stored in a retrievable format (zip files).

On completion of the project, D4GO contributors will be asked to remove copies of data sets provided by the Organization which may have been copied to their local computers for processing.

No attempt will be made to use the data for identification and administration of specific individuals or cases for the clients, donors, or any other such persons connected to the Organization.

D4GO will not publicize, distribute or otherwise make available any results of the analysis without the Organization’s written approval, with the following exceptions: analyses developed for the project may be used as samples or training materials by D4GO or its members.

The Organization will be notified immediately in writing in the event that we become aware that there has been a breach in any of the terms outlined above.