Respondents’ rights to privacy and confidentiality are respected and their information is stored securely.
The cooperation and goodwill of respondents is essential and is maintained by protecting the information that they supply. Without this cooperation, response rates can be too low and threaten the accuracy or even the utility of the statistics. Public concern about inadequate protection of confidentiality by any government agency can lessen general public confidence in official statistics.
The terms privacy, confidentiality and security are often used interchangeably.
- Privacy refers to the ability of a person to control the availability of information about themselves.
- Confidentiality refers to the protection of individuals’ and organisations’ information, ensuring that the information is not made available or disclosed to unauthorised individuals or entities.
- Security refers to how the publishing agency stores and controls access to the data it holds.
Key elements of this principle
- Legislative and ethical obligations governing the collection of data, confidentiality, privacy and release are rigorously followed.
- Data provided by respondents is only used for statistical purposes.
- Respondents are informed of the main intended uses and access limitations applying to the information they provide.
- Respondent’s anonymity is always strictly preserved unless there is explicit agreement to the contrary.
- Everyone involved in the production of official statistics is aware of their obligation to protect provider confidentiality and of the legal penalties for wrongful disclosure. This obligation continues to apply after completion of service.
- Access to identifiable unit records of information supplied by respondents is restricted to staff who need to use it for the purposes for which it was collected.
- Unless legal permission is provided to allow identification of information in data collected for administrative purposes, the same confidentiality and privacy standards will apply to statistics derived from administrative sources as apply to data collected for statistical purposes.
Back to OSS principles for Tier 1 statistics producers.