WEBSITE DISCLAIMER
POLICY STATEMENT ON CONFIDENTIALITY OF MILKBENCH+ DATA
1. Objective of confidentiality policy
The objective of the Milkbench+ confidentiality policy is to ensure that no information about any individual business can be identified outside of the Milkbench+ system, without the express consent of the farmer.
2. People involved
Every farmer participating in Milkbench+ provides information in confidence to a on-line computer dairy benchmarking system. A report is then generated based on the information given which compares or benchmarks financial and physical information against other similar dairy enterprises helping farmers to see where potential savings could be made and how profitability can be increased on that farm.
DairyCo will also use the farmer’s data collected from the Milkbench+ system for industry analysis, this data will be used anonymously and no direct identifier will be published.
A direct identifier is a name, address, telephone number, VAT number or any piece of information which may, on its own, directly identify a farmer or farm business. Other attributes which can assist in identifying a farmer of farm business only with the help of additional information are not direct identifiers; examples are age, occupation, size of farm, approximate location etc.
3. Data involved
This policy focuses on three classes of data and sets out who will have access to each type of data:
(a) Farm accounts and related information containing direct identifiers
Only the farmer or consultant nominated by the farmer will have the farmers trade registration number and authorisation code to enable them to access this class of data.
In addition there is an Administrator of the benchmarking system employed by DairyCo who validates the data and an IT Manager contracted to DairyCo who must sign a confidentiality undertaking.
(b) anonymous Benchmark data relating to individual persons or businesses
By entering your data you are consenting that your individual data, in anonymous form, may be shared with other participating farmers. Except for farmers discussion groups, data passed to other participating farmers will never contain the collective data from less than 5 farms and therefore an individual farms data remains confidential.
Where by separate written agreement farmers have formed a discussion group of up to 10 farmers, each farmer will have access to the data of each farmer taking part in the discussion group as will the Consultants and Extension Officers for the use of individual data to use in discussion groups. This position can be reviewed at any time by changing access permission so that a consultant or Extension Officer’s ability to view a farmer’s data can be withdrawn by the farmer.
(c) grouped data, and the conditions under which they may be published
DairyCo may publish or generally make available Grouped data only in a form that does not allow identification of any individual business, by direct or indirect means, even by someone with specialist knowledge.
In particular, a group will never contain data from less than 5 farms. Normally, groups will contain more than 5 farms for reasons of reliability and robustness.
DairyCo may also provide the Grouped Data to academic institutions or other research organisations in order to carry out specific pieces of research of benefit to British dairy farmers, however no direct identifiers will be made available without the approval of the Milkbench+ members.
Researchers will undertake not to attempt to identify which person or business any of the data relate to; and in particular, not to attempt to match the individual data with any other source;