Privacy and survey research: Guaranteeing anonymity when disclosing sensitive information

Our colleague Maikel Groenewoud has given a presentation about privacy and survey research at the Amsterdam Privacy Conference 2015. The main focus of his presentation was on illustrating how the anonymity of respondents’ answers can be guaranteed when investigating sensitive topics, by using the randomized response method.

The exponential increase in data being generated and collected in modern society has caused increasing concerns about privacy issues, especially in relation to the disclosure of sensitive information. Randomized response is traditionally used in the data collection process to give respondents a guarantee of privacy. Potentially, a form of this technique can also be applied to so-called ‘big data’.