My main contribution was to describe why I think that fear of data breaches was the primary cause of the increasing delays, together with some thoughts on how to mitigate the risks and the concerns.
Luckily, schemes like the Office for National Statistics Approved asia rcs data Researcher Scheme and the UK Data Service Safe Researcher Training are already making it safer to share and access personal data for research, and easier to work through the admin. Thorough training in data protection and appropriate agreements before accessing the data can help ensure confidentiality.
However, we the researchers and analysts also have much to learn if we want to be able to access and contribute to Open Data resources, whereby the data extracts need to be both valuable to research and anonymous.
Studies using large-scale data such as linked administrative records should be possible using anonymous data, as the analysts don’t need to know who the participants are.
However, the richer the data are in demographic or contextual information (for example, socio-economic or location information), the higher the risk is that the data subjects could be identified by somebody trying to do so.