PROMISE AND CHALLENGES IN LINKING SOCIAL AND SPATIAL DATA

Report recommends ways to advance research while protecting confidentiality

The National Academies has published Putting People on the Map: Protecting Confidentiality with Linked Social-Spatial Data. This report focuses on the opportunities and challenges when accurate and precise spatial data on research participants, such as the locations of their homes or workplaces, are linked to information they have provided under promises of confidentiality.

Precise, accurate spatial information linked to social and behavioral data are revolutionizing social science by opening new questions for investigation and improving understanding of human behavior in its environmental context. For example, with linked social-spatial data, researchers can explore how young people develop healthy lifestyles, and how families in poorer countries spend their time obtaining the energy and food that they need to survive, and how climate change will affect human well-being in particular places. Such research can transform social science and significantly advance policymaking.

At the same time, precise spatial data make it more likely that individuals can be identified, breaching the promise of confidentiality made when the data were collected. Because norms of science and government agencies favor open access to all scientific data, the tension between the benefits of open access and the risks associated with potential breach of confidentiality pose significant challenges to researchers, research sponsors, scientific institutions, and data archivists. The report finds that several technical approaches for making data available while limiting risk have potential, but none is adequate on its own or in combination. Highly restricted forms of data management and dissemination carry very high costs: by making it prohibitively difficult for researchers to gain access to data or by restricting the data so much that it is no longer useful in answering questions.

The report concludes that institutional approaches for controlling access to data, involving establishing tiers of risk and access, will be required to achieve the promise of gaining important scientific knowledge from linked social-spatial data while balancing the needs of data access, data quality, and confidentiality. The report offers recommendations for education, training, research, and practice to researchers, professional societies, research sponsors, institutional review boards, and data stewards.

The study was performed under the National Research Council’s Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, by its Panel on Confidentiality Issues Arising from the Integration of Remotely Sensed and Self-identifying Data, with funding from the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Science Foundation, and NASA.