Confidentiality Confidentiality is the protection of personal information.

Confidentiality means keeping a clients information between you and the client, and not telling others including co-workers, friends, family, etc. Examples of maintaining confidentiality include:

individual files are locked and secured support workers do not tell other people what is in a clients file unless they have permission from the client information about clients is not told to people who do not need to know clients medical details are not discussed without their consent adult clients have the right to keep any information about themselves confidential, which includes that information being kept from family and friends.

Providing anonymity of information collected from students or research participants means that either the project does not collect identifying information of individual subjects (e.g., name, address, email address, etc.), or the project cannot link individual responses with participants identities. Generally, online surveys (SurveyMonkey, Remark, Google, and others) are accomplished with anonymity. However, there are some exceptions. For example, some online survey software collects IP (internet protocol) addresses which could identify the computer user. It is also possible that a survey could include enough identifiers (gender, age, race, worksite, etc.) that could distinguish a person in the dataset when downloaded. Imagine a survey of teachers at a certain CUNY college done by computer it might be possible to associate responses from the female, aged 50 55, AsianAmerican professor in the ABC department who thought she had anonymity.

Maintaining confidentiality of information collected from research participants means that only the investigator(s) or individuals collecting/analyzing data can identify the responses of individual subjects; however, the researchers must make every effort to prevent anyone outside of the project from connecting individual subjects with their responses.