Data security
- Your right to privacy is important to Thiscovery and to the project team.
- Thiscovery takes the security of your information seriously and has policies and processes in place to ensure that your data is safe.
- Thiscovery’s privacy policy describes the way we collect information, how we use it and how we protect it.
- For specific information about how information will be used in this project, please see below.
Who is responsible for collecting my information?
- We are collecting information about you on behalf of the University of Bristol.
- Under data protection legislation, the University of Bristol is the Controller responsible for the processing of your personal information to conduct the project. This means that they are responsible for making sure your personal information is kept secure, confidential and used only in the way you have been told it will be used.
- They are supported in this by us (Thiscovery), who are known as data processors for this project.
What information will you collect about me?
- To take part in this project the project team will need to collect information that could identify you, called “personal identifiable information”. We will need to use the following information from you for this project:
- Your answers to questions; some of the information that you provide whilst answering questions might be considered as health data or other data that would be classed as Special Category data under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR).
- Your name and email address if you would like to be invited to the next stage of the project or receive a summary of the results.
What is your lawful basis for processing my personal information?
- We are collecting and storing this personal identifiable information in accordance with UK data protection laws which protect your rights. These state that we must have a lawful basis (specific reason) for collecting your data. The lawful basis for processing your personal information is decided by the University of Bristol as Controllers for the data.
- For this University of Bristol project, the collection of the personal identifiable information is done on the basis of “a legitimate interest” and/or “a process necessary for research purposes” .
How will my personal information be looked after?
Your data will be looked after in the following way:
- If you opt to provide your name and email address, only THIS Labs will have access to this. We will only contact you with your permission to provide a summary of results and invite you to the next part of this project.
- The only circumstances in which the University of Bristol will have access to your name and email address is if you have given permission for them to contact you directly. In these circumstances, your name and email address are not linked to the information you have provided by answering questions in the project.
- We separate your name and email address (if provided) from any answers you provide as part of this project and store these securely in separate datasets, one containing contact details and one containing your project responses.
- This means that in the project dataset, instead of using your name and email to identify your responses, an ID number will be used instead. This is called pseudonymisation.
- The pseudonymised dataset is what the project team at the University of Bristol will use for analysis. This dataset may contain other personal information as part of the answers you give to questions in the project, such as information about your role.
- Unfortunately, if you opt out of providing your name or email, you will not be able to withdraw from the project if you decide later you no longer wish to be involved, as we will be unable to identify your response.
- We take appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure that we keep your information secure, accurate and up to date, and that we only keep it as long as is reasonable and necessary.
- Although we use appropriate security measures once we have received your personal information, the transmission of information when you submit it over the internet is never completely secure. We do our best to protect personal information, but we cannot guarantee the security of information transmitted to our website, so any transmission is at the user’s own risk.
- Information on how THIS Labs will process your personal information, and how to manage your Thiscovery account, is available on Thiscovery's privacy policy.
Will my personal information ever be shared?
- We will never share personal information in any way not described in this participation information or in Thiscovery's privacy policy.
- However, occasionally information provided within a project may be useful to better understand how to conduct online research or to develop new approaches to analysing data.
- If you agree to take part in this project, we may use some of the information we gather from you to improve the methods we use on Thiscovery. If, to do so, we need to share information with external researchers or analysts, all information will be fully anonymised.
- By anonymised, we mean that we will remove the ID number used to link your answers to your name, locate and remove any other identifying information (for example, names of NHS Trusts, place names), and any other indirect identifying information (such as specific details about health or experiences).
How long will my personal information and identifiable responses be held?
- Thiscovery and the University of Bristol will not keep personal data longer than is necessary for the purpose or purposes for which they were collected. For this project, this means that once the project team have finished all analyses and produced all the outputs needed for the project, we will take all reasonable steps to destroy, or erase from our systems, all data that is no longer required.
What if I have a complaint or concern?
- For questions or concerns about anything to do with the project or for technical problems or questions about the platform, please contact the Thiscovery team at help@thiscovery.org.
- If you have any concerns and would like to contact someone who is independent of the study, please contact the University of Bristol Governance Team by email: research-governance@bristol.ac.uk.
How can I find out more about how my personal data is used?
- University of Bristol’s privacy notice describes how they use personal data and explains how you can contact them. The University of Bristol will protect your information in line with the requirements of the UK Data Protection Act 2018.
- Thiscovery's privacy notice describes how we use personal data and protect your information.
