Protecting Human Subjects is paramount to any research being conducted by students, faculty and other researches at CGU. Conducting research through a digital medium is even more important. The following are some considerations that should be considered when conducting research digitally, especially over the internet:

Use a CGU Issued Laptop If Possible:

• OIT has security settings applied to all issued laptops
• CGU issued laptops already use full disk encryption
• Device will already be up to date
• OIT can assist you more easily

If You Need to Use a Personal Computer:

• Make sure the computer’s operating system and software is up to date
• Use whole disk or file/folder encryption such as FileVault/Disk Utility on MacOS, BitLocker/EFS on Windows, or VeraCrypt on any system.
• Use up to date Anti-Virus software.
• Ensure that the Operating System’s built in Firewall is enabled.
• Avoid using shared public networks such as public WiFi
• If possible, use a separate computer for research, rather than the one used for personal computing
• Install as few programs as possible on the computer being used for research

Ensure Your Research Data is Secure:

• Maintain backups of your data
• Only keep data in a few places for redundancy, but not more places than necessary, to mitigate data loss or breaches (e.g. Thumb Drives getting lost)
• Enable encryption on the backup that you take and save the encryption key somewhere secure.

If using online tools that store and/or share Human Subject Data:

• Use a strong password or passphrase to protect data
• Share data to unique users/email address, rather than using generic links
• Store data in OneDrive, Teams or SharePoint
• Encrypt any data being transmitted
• Maintain an inventory of all research data being kept
• Maintain a system to separate (as much as possible) Identifiable Information from Raw data being analyzed
• Keep a catalog of names of subjects separate from audio and video recordings
• Create a naming convention for data files and data assets that are unidentifiable from human subjects
• Delete any data that is not necessary to keep