The data protocol is a public statement about DRD's commitment to confidentiality and security of information.

The data which is sent to DRD is maintained on secured servers using the best industry standards for authentication and encryption.  In order to maintain the anonymity of individual case data in our database, we use standard statistical disclosure control methods.  These techniques were developed first for the U.S. Census Bureau to ensure that individual respondents could not be identified in the publicly released data.  These methods involve systematically obfuscating the individual data records, so that a particular case is not identifiable, but aggregate statistical results using the modified data are consistent with the original data and, therefore, produce valid statistical inferences.

 For more information on DRD's Data Protocol, click here.