Data Protection

TILDA does and will continue to maintain strict measures to protect confidentiality.  Each participant has their own unique identification number. With the exception of the document that contains your personal information, which will always be handled separately, all other information will be anonymised – this means any information which can identify a respondent, such as name and address or date of birth, is taken off the data and samples and is stored separately. We will only grant access to this anonymised data for ethically and scientifically approved research.

Access to the interview system is controlled by a password. All interview data on the laptop is automatically encrypted, or stored in a format which would be meaningless to any unauthorised person who looked at it. Laptops used during the Health Assessments are also password protected and all the data collected is anonymised and automatically encrypted. Biological samples collected are coded using the respondent identification number only.