Ask HN: Is a survey anonymous if an entity can easily identify the person?

3 points by omalamo 5 years ago | 1 comment

I'm currently working at an IT school department. We have a intranet where all students and teachers are registered and manage the school bureaucracies.

By law, at the end of the year, we have to ask everyone for feedback, so we can improve things. This survey is advertised as anonymous.

To make sure everyone has answered, the system creates a simple relationship in a database, between the person (identified with the school number) and their answers.

After that, our team exports this data and hands over to a person to interpret it.

I don't think this is anonymous, but this person says it is, because "I won't identify" and "no one else in the public can identify it".

Is that so?

Nextgrid 5 years ago |

It's not anonymous; even if the intended user can't identify anyone, the people above them can (as they have access to the infrastructure). It would be a bit different if the survey was hosted on a neutral third-party's infrastructure. Furthermore the simple fact that the data exists means it can leak by accident later on down the line and this would apply to both in-house and third-party surveys.