Under Lock and Key? Setting up a Secure Data Center at GESIS in Germany
Katharina E. Kinder-Kurlanda, Christina Eder · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2013
This poster is about the specific challenges in setting up a secure data service at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. German data protection law (Bundesdatenschutzgesetz) gives every person the right to protection of their personal data. The re-use of survey data, for example, must be provided in a way that no individual person is identifiable. This usually means that data is anonymized. However, anonymization is often difficult to achieve without compromising the quality of the data. To enable research access to disclosive data, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences is establishing a secure data center with three controlled access points: A low-level solution employing a comprehensive legal contract, a safe room providing particularly strict access control, and, a remote access system. Using German electoral survey data as a practical example, we will examine the technical and organizational challenges, opportunities and questions that arise when building a secure data service in the context of the German data protection framework, which comprises both federal and state laws. We introduce our strategy of setting up pilots for the usage models. This strategy enables us to better understand the legal framework and GESIS's role within it, and also to improve the service's usability by integrating test users' feedback.