These are the best practices for data privacy that MANYC has developed for itself. It is not advice for others, because every group has its own needs, but understanding why to do a sepcific thing is important.

Principals:

Mutual Aid NYC has a set of guiding principles that we hold to. MANYC Tech specifically has a set of principles.

we adhere to:

Mission, Vision, Values, Goals

This article by Electronic Frontier Foundation is good for background and high level overview on data privacy principles.

Privacy Practices:

Data can often be used for actions other then the intended mutual aid. People engaged in doxxing, stalking, or marketing could use Mutual Aid datasets for well beyond their intended purpose. Its important to protect your "needs requests" and volunteer data. Here's how Mutual Aid NYC has done so:

Collect only what data you need.

In general its rare that any data source is going to be 100% secure. Data is only as secure as the login of the person with the most open personal security practices. So only collect what you need and anonymize as much as possible.

1. We have a field for Name
   • People can put in what they want, we don't collect last names.
   • For people who are undocumented names
2. We do not collect addresses for needs requests
   • This is to again protect undocumented folks, victums of abuse, as well. The less data collected the better. We collect neightborhood & cross street (which is optional).

Both of these assumes there's some reaching out to the person to get their address. But that will be in a much smaller dataset either

• by one of MANYC partners
• with the volunteer & dispatcher involved, but again not centrally stored.

Delete the Data when you're done with it

Keep anonymized data, but delete personally identifiable data when you can. (name, phone #, email, cross street).

Know the data retention of the platform you're using:

• Google Sheets: Keeps data forever. You can always go back into the "history" of the sheet to find data
• Airtable: Free version keeps data for 2 weeks. Pro version has data available for 1 year. (Most Mutual Aid groups using Airtable have the pro version as it is given for free).