How does the Network protect your privacy?

We have many safeguards in place to ensure that researchers never see any directly identifying information, such as names, full addresses, full dates of birth, national insurance numbers, etc. All identifying information is removed from the datasets. Researchers are interested in identifying trends to understand the bigger picture that will prove of benefit to society. The 'Protecting Privacy' pages explain how the data is protected and linked.

If different datasets are linked to each other, they will be linked by an independent and trustworthy organisation, such as the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) or National Records for Scotland.

You can find out more about how we protect your privacy here.

Because we realise that the data may contain sensitive information, we apply the “5 Safes principle”, which is explained by this video created by the UK Data Service.