PrivaScope Governance

PrivaScope Review Board

The PrivaScope Review Board will be appointed by the Vice President for Information Technology and the Chief Information Officer, and will include:

  • Multiple faculty members (to represent both research diversity, and expertise in privacy)
  • The University Privacy Officer
  • A member of the General Counsel’s Office
  • A faculty member with expertise in ethics
  • A technical expert who fully understands the details of the PrivaScope system

Individual board members will be named at a future date.

Relationship Institutional Review Board

Separately, under the existing IRB process, the IRB decides whether to approve the use of administrative or operational data. However, it is up to the researcher to convince the appropriate data steward to make the data available, redacted or anonymized as they see fit or are able to technically do. For example, the Registrar’s Office may or may not be willing to supply some subset of grade data to an IRB-approved researcher. One issues is that no one is looking at the intersection of multiple data sets and how access to other data might undermine anonymization.

PrivaScope is intended to be complementary to and supportive of the existing IRB process. With PrivaScope, data stewards can choose to include some or all of their data within the PrivaScope environment. In this environment, researchers do not have direct access to the data-sets; instead, they have access to the results of algorithms run against that data set and other data sets as well.

Model

PrivaScope will be open to collaborators from other institutions who work with our research faculty and comply with legal guidelines. Possibilities for opening PrivaScope to a wider, national research community will be addressed at a later date.