What we do
Protecting your data
We understand that people need to be confident their personal information will be held securely, so we protect it with strict security measures.
By law we keep your personal census details confidential for 100 years. Until then, we will not share or publish information that would reveal personal information about you or the place you live. So your personal information is not shared with local councils, government departments, the tax office, the police or marketing agencies.
Access to personal census information is tightly controlled. All census staff are trained how to handle personal information and they give a written commitment to confirm they understand it is a criminal offence to break the confidentiality of personal census details.
How do we protect your data?
Security
We have our own security team, which applies UK government security standards to all areas of the census operation. We regularly review our security measures and improve them when necessary.
We have used independent information specialists to review our security arrangements and procedures, and this has provided us with assurance that the appropriate security controls are being applied to census information.
All personal information collected in the 2011 Census is processed in Scotland.
IT security
We take IT security very seriously and make sure that we apply strict controls to prevent any unauthorised access to personal data.
Online returns are protected by strong security arrangements, based on tried and trusted technology. Your Internet Questionnaire Access Code is unique to your address, and for extra security you will be asked to create a password.
We use secure sockets layer (SSL) to encrypt communications between your web browser and the receiving web server. This is an industry-standard protocol and keeps your data secure.
You should always be on the look-out for phishing scams, which are designed to trick you into revealing personal information. They are usually emails or messages that seem to be from a legitimate source and are sometimes quite convincing.
We will never send you an email asking for personal census information, direct or through a website, including the official census website. If you receive an email like this and it seems to come from us, then do not reply, do not click on any links and do not open attachments – no matter how genuine everything looks. Please forward the email to our security team then delete it.
After the census
We will securely wipe or destroy (or both) all data storage equipment used during the census to ensure no personal information can be retrieved. Independent checks will make sure these processes meet UK government standards.
We will also securely destroy all the returned paper questionnaires.
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