Data Security and Data Protection

In research projects dealing with human subjects, research data management and data protection are closely related. Therefore, research in the areas of data security and data protection is concerned with the technical, legal and ethical challenges that arise out of keeping data secure. Such challenges include the growing amount of partly sensitive data on the individual level, new data sources (e.g. social media), new possibilities to link data, and the question of how to keep such data secure, yet accessible in increasingly networked research environments.

Existing work covers the application of data protection legislation to empirical social research (Watteler & Kinder-Kurlanda 2015), security practices within organizations (z.B. Poller et al. 2017), and data ethics (z.B. Kinder-Kurlanda & Zimmer 2017, Kinder-Kurlanda & Ehrwein 2015). This research area stands in close connection to similar efforts concerning official microdata in the GESIS German Microdata Lab (GML).