Data protection

How we in CIRCD work to protect personal data

In CIRCD, we aim to contribute to the improvement of human communication and interaction in various settings. To do this, we study how humans interact. Therefore, our analyses are almost always based on authentic footage of different types of interaction. 

We are very grateful that people give us insight into their lives and access to study them. Therefore, it is always of the utmost importance that all our informants can feel safe and assured that their personal data are safe with us. Thus one of our top priorities is to conduct considerate and ethically responsible data collection and data protection. We continuously work to secure privacy and intellectual property rights and to guard the reputation of our collaborators. We have always worked that way.

In 2016, new rules were adopted in our centre for the processing of personal data. This took shape from the early implementation of an EU regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation GDPR. The regulation came into force on May 25th 2018 and has fundamentally affected how both the private and the public sectors handle personal data.

In CIRCD, we have taken serious actions to further ensure that we meet these new and stricter regulations – and all before they were put into force. Therefore, we have worked to further secure and optimize our data handling by creating and implementing new and stricter procedures for how different types of data are collected, transported, backed up, stored securely and anonymized.   

For many years we have been testing a range of software for anonymizing footage and photos. A few examples of how we anonymize video data may be seen in the photos below.