Privacy & Security Protocols
The All of Us Research Program uses high-quality security technology to help keep participant data safe. The data that participants give to the All of Us Research Program are personal. To protect this information, we follow strict security protocols and processes that are regularly reviewed and updated by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the All of Us Research Program.
Our rigorous security practices help ensure data are protected and used ethically and responsibly.
These are some of the specific steps we are taking to protect participant information:
- We require All of Us Research Program partner organizations to show that they can meet strict data security standards before they may collect, transfer, or store information from participants.
- We encrypt all participant data. We also remove obvious identifiers from data used for research. This means names, addresses, and other identifying information are separate from the health information.
- We require researchers seeking access to All of Us Research Program data to first register with the program, complete our ethics training, and agree to a code of conduct for responsible data use.
- We make data available on a secure platform—the All of Us Research Hub—and track the activity of all researchers who use it.
- We enlist independent reviewers to check our plans and test our systems on an ongoing basis. These reviewers help make sure we have effective security controls in place, responsive to emerging threats.
For more details, please read the Precision Medicine Initiative Data Security Policy Principles and Framework and the Privacy and Trust Principles.
