Privacy and Confidentiality

Att. 6 - Privacy Act & Confidentiality Determination: CDC Ideation Catalyst (I-Catalyst) Program and Customer Engagement Information Collection

OMB Project Number: 0920-1158; Document 2020-XXXX

Assurance of Confidentiality Provided to Respondents

Activities for this request do not involve the collection of Individually Identifiable Information. I-Catalyst program team informal interviews involves no collection of sensitive and or personal identifiable information. The informal conversations are not recorded and only insights are drawn from them and therefore no need for maintenance of personal information. While participants (CDC Staff) may ask about certain demographic information of their stakeholder/respondents to assess various factors (i.e. the length of employment at job to assess extent of experience, network of contacts or resources), no information received during the unstructured interviews are tied directly to the respondents. Respondents will not be promised confidentiality but interviewers will advise them that opinions and impressions they provide during the interviews will be used only to describe the general trends and directions of what respondents’ value and need, and what their top barriers and pain points are. CDC staff will protect the identity of the respondents by not attributing observations or comments to specific individuals nor reference their names, titles, or organizational affiliations in any written documents or reports. CDC will treat data/information in a secure manner and will not disclose, unless otherwise compelled by law. CDC will keep the information that respondents provide private and secure to the extent permitted by law.

The CDC teams will protect the identity of the respondents in the following ways:

1. Except for interview sessions, respondents do not participate in interviews with other respondents. Teams do not repeat something said in one interview to another respondent in another interview.

2. Teams do not discuss either the information obtained or their opinions of it with people outside of the I-Catalyst program.

3. In order to honor their assurances to each respondent, the CDC teams do not attribute observations or comments to specific individuals nor reference their names, titles, or organizational affiliations in the written report.

4. All workstations used for the implementation analysis will be part of the local area network (LAN) at the CDC. Data stored on network drives is protected using the security mechanisms available through the network operating system used on their primary network servers. These networks are protected from unauthorized external access through the networks’ firewalls. These firewalls reside between the networks and the communications lines over which their Internet traffic flows.

5. Access to all network features such as software, files, printers, Internet, E-mail and other peripherals is controlled by user ID and password.

Justification for Sensitive Questions

a. There are no sensitive data items to be asked of individual respondents.

1. It is possible that some respondents will be asked about their organization’s policies, performance data, or other practices. These individuals may view this as sensitive, if disclosure of such information could result in liability or competitive disadvantage to the organization.