Through our contacts at the Warwick Observatory for Social Mobility, several of our company are able to attend an invitation-only conference, hosted at the Shard (a very recognizable landmark on the London landscape) by the National Center for Research Methods.

The premise of the conference is to explore the dilemmas that arise between a scholarly concern with social progress and the ethical and social issues that ensue in linkage of data for research purposes (the joining of anonymized or pseudo-anonymized individual records from two or more large administrative or survey datasets). While innovative technologies create new opportunities for knowledge, they also invade privacy and provide new channels for discrimination. The event stimulates informed debate across multiple stakeholders—social scientists, research funders and policy makers.