Confidential data are often critical to providing reentry services to participants, conducting program evaluations, and satisfying performance metric requirements related to grant funding. Collecting such data also comes with a responsibility to follow ethical standards and best practices at each step during collection.  

Guidelines for maintaining data confidentiality include the following: 

• Understand the type of sensitive information that you are storing. 
• Limit the type and amount of data collected to the essentials. 
• Encrypt sensitive files and strictly manage access. 
• Protect the data collected by securing both physical and digital copies of data and developing a secure data disposal plan. 
• Manage how data are securely used and on what devices. 
• Provide comprehensive data confidentiality training for all team members; include an incident response plan to quickly respond to data breaches.  

Guidelines for transmitting data include the following: 

• Ensure you have proper permission to share or receive data. 
• Never send confidential data in the body of an email message without encryption; instead, encrypt emails, and, if attaching files, password-protect the files.  
• When possible, use a secure file transfer program instead of email to send or receive confidential data. 
• If data must be stored on an external storage device, encrypt the sensitive information stored on the device. 

In addition to following the above guidance for maintaining and transmitting confidential data, funder and partner data security requirements and policies must also be confirmed before collecting any data. This brief from the Evaluation and Sustainability Training and Technical Assistance (ES TTA) team at RTI International and the Center for Justice Innovation (formerly the Center for Court Innovation) reviews the guidelines and best practices to ensure the confidentiality of participant data. 

View the brief (PDF)