The Five Safes is a framework for helping make decisions about making effective use of data which is confidential or sensitive. – The Five Safes proposes that data management decisions be considered as solving problems in five ‘dimensions’:
- projects (Is this use of the data appropriate?),
- people (Can the users be trusted to use it in an appropriate manner?),
- settings (Does the access facility limit unauthorised use?),
- data (Is there a disclosure risk in the data itself?) and
- outputs (Are the statistical results non-disclosive?).
The combination of the controls leads to ‘safe use’.