Personal, confidential, client, student, employee, and business data

Unit ID: AIT-M11-U01 Estimated active time: 15-20 minutes

The main idea

Different roles create different duties of care.

The same sentence about a person carries different obligations depending on whether they are your customer, your student, your patient or your colleague.

Why this matters

These duties are usually written down somewhere, and they usually pre-date the tool. The obligation did not change because the typing got easier.

Safe example

Student performance notes and employee feedback need stronger protection than fictional notes.

Both are about identifiable people who did not choose to be discussed, and both can affect the person's future.

Better working habit

Follow organisation policy and use safe samples for learning.

For practice, a fictional version teaches the same skill with none of the risk.

What to watch for

Changing names alone may not make information safe.

In a small team, a rare circumstance or a single named site, the details identify the person even with the name removed.

Mini practice

Rewrite a sensitive scenario as a safe fictional sample.

Then check whether anyone who knows the situation could still recognise it.

Check yourself

Before moving on, answer:

• Whose data is this, and what duty do I owe them?
• Could someone identify the person from what remains?
• Would a fictional version teach me the same thing?