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The Free Terabyte
What a room of research-data people, a Flemish soil certificate, and a Google survey say about who carries the cost of managing research data
Sixteen Post-its went up on a wall, anonymously, at a training session for the people who are supposed to help researchers look after their data.
The question was simple: What is the worst data case you have met?
One note described a survey. The dataset included profile variables and respondents’ open-text comments, and it was made available online for anyone to download. The note also recorded the defense that went with it, with a shrug you could almost hear through the ink:
The data was anonymous, apparently.
That is the whole problem in a single line, and I doubt it is a problem of ignorance. The shrug suggests someone who had already heard the objection.
For anyone who has never had to think about this (first, lucky you), here is why the defense fails. Removing names does not make people unidentifiable. A department head in her forties who mentions her reorganization in an open comment, in a dataset that records her age bracket, her role, and her faculty, is not anonymous to anyone in her building.
