Vlds Privacy And Security Explained

You know what VLDS is, right? This is the story about how VLDS was built to ensure Virginians' personal data and privacy are not compromised. VLDS securely links double-deidentified data across multiple state agencies without giving up our personal info. It's important to know that VLDS does not collect religious, political, voting, or medical information. In fact, VLDS does not collect or warehouse any data at all. Nor does VLDS send personally-identifiable data to the federal government or any organization for that matter. Creating the VLDS began with a promise to comply with and often exceed all state and federal privacy laws. There are two main systems in place to do this. One is an access system. The other is a new and Virginia-grown technology. Virginia required that personally-identifiable data never leave the existing protection of the participating agencies. How does VLDS merge data without private data leaving the agencies? With an extremely complex technology developed right here in Virginia. Here's how it works! Meet Viviana. She graduated high school in 2008 and then from an in-state university in 2012. Here's Vivianna's data in the VDOE and SCHEV databases. Let's find out how VLDS merges Vivianna's personal data from two separate agencies without exposing privacy. For example, researchers want data on how well a group of high school students were prepared for college And Vivianna's high school and college records are part of the large group needed for the research. VLDS applies a data scrambling called a "one-way hash" to the private data in each agency. That's encryption without a key or cypher that could be used to decrypt the private data. In this case, Vivianna's personal information is scrambled into a string of meaningless characters. Now that all the personal data has been scrambled in both databases, it can be securely merged. Then just to be doubly sure, that already hashed personal data is scrambled once again. This is double-deidentification using two techniques with no keys and no way to reverse-engineer. Remember, VLDS data is not something anyone can just log into or access. Researchers have to apply for access, sign contracts, and are walked through and supervised throughout the process by VLDS agency sponsors who check the data for accuracy and privacy before it can move onto the next step. And remember no one, including the VLDS agency staff, can decrypt this double-deidentification data. Virginia now has a powerful tool for extracting and analyzing insightful education and workforce development data within a secure environment All by referring to just one resource... VLDS.