Your anonymized data forms the international Control Group database. By contributing your data to this important pool of health information, you are helping us to build an independent source of information about our health and the impact we are having on it.
What is different about our data?
We are a worldwide, platform cooperative funded by its own members, which means there is a genuine interest in unbiased outcomes.
We are not funded by corporations looking to approve or make profit from a product.
When any researchers use our data to write papers and reports, we will ensure the (highly anonymized) source data is available for review – which will ensure results can be verified.
What information do we collect?
Our participants enter information about their height, weight, age, food styles, blood group, previous health conditions and vaccinations taken, then each month we ask them to log any new health conditions, treatments, or procedures. Females can log changes to their monthly cycle and record pregnancies and their outcomes.
This creates a massive pool of health information from people of all ages that can be studied to look for trends in health, disease, treatment outcomes and environmental impact.
The data is self-reported and our system allows users to record the things they do to stay healthy, as well as the treatments they take or use when they are unwell.
What will happen to the results?
Scientists, doctors and researchers will be able to access your anonymized health outcomes so they can publish reports and papers on it. This data will not have personal contact or identifying information attached to it.
Copies of published reports will be made available to everyone in the Research section.
As we develop this system, we will be building a dashboard analysis tool that will allow all users of the database to be able to view a number of data points for themselves.
We believe it is important that we all re-connect with our human bodies; what makes them work and what impedes them. Our health outcomes, recorded and analysed outside of a financially incentivized, biased system, will help us to look at what the life we live, is doing to us all.
Will you sell my data?
No, we will not sell your data.
How are we Ensuring Data Privacy?
Firstly, we try to ensure that any data required for the participant record excludes personally identifiable information. For example, we don't ask for full date of birth.
The only personally identifiable data that we ask for is an email address, which is immediately encoded and stored in a separate repository to the participant record. Therefore, the participant record never has any personally identifiable data attributed to it directly.
When Associates join we do need to obtain a delivery address for their ID Cards and this information is again stored in its own repository.
All data transfer is completed using HTTPS protocol, ensuring it is protected while in transit and the data is always stored in an encrypted state. Further double encryption is used for passwords.
All membership IDs are generated randomly using very large numbers so as to avoid sequentially numbered participants, which again helps protect our data.
Furthermore, layers of protection are employed across our platform to protect our service from denial of service and hacking attempts.
The data is owned and managed by The Control Group Cooperative Ltd, a legal entity registered and protected by UK law, which is owned by its members. The cooperative business structure ensures that there are no shareholders, only stakeholders. With no shares to sell and no public record of who the stakeholders are, we can provide protection against acquisition from any large corporations who might otherwise seek to take possession of our data.
GDPR
As a Cooperative organisation whose sole purpose is to collate data for this control group, and whose purpose is not to enrich anyone, we are exempt from General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as per guidance received from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).
Let me be clear: we are not sharing any individual’s medical information or any other personal information for that matter. Aggregated information will be compiled for independent researchers and this will be overseen by our ethics panel.
As a Cooperative organisation we are managed by our members whose data we hold, and they will decide how their data is used.