Our first priority is to ensure that the Edinburgh Study is conducted safely and that any data collected is held securely. As data held by the Edinburgh Study are personal data, they are subject to the Data Protection Act 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation of the EU. Ethical approval for the study has been granted at each phase of fieldwork by the University of Edinburgh’s School of Law Research Ethics Committee.A Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) was conducted and approved by the University of Edinburgh’s Data Protection Officer on 23rd July 2019. The DPIA provides that all study data will be held on the University’s secure Datastore system which has strict security measures in place to prevent unauthorised access to file servers. Data will be held in folders that can be authorised only by approved users (members of the study team). There is restricted access to the databases holding personal data (names, dates of birth, addresses, telephone numbers, etc) which are held only for cohort contact and data linkage purposes. All folders are password protected.Any personal data held on paper records are kept secure in locked cabinets and in locked rooms. Only restricted members of the study team will have access to these cabinets. Researchers have access to only the information necessary to conduct their fieldwork. While conducting fieldwork, personal data will only be accessible via tablets carried by the researchers, which will be password protected and encrypted.Data transfer on criminal convictions data will take place through a secure data transfer service, operated as standard by Police Scotland. All those with access to personal data collected through the Edinburgh Study are subject to strict protocols as to how they can use and access the data. No information collected about study members is passed on to Police Scotland during administrative data collection.Any information published from the study will be presented at an aggregate level and will not allow any individual to be identified, either directly or indirectly. As is standard for publicly funded academic research, data collected by the study may be shared, but only in an anonymised form, to allow reuse by other researchers (e.g. through the UK Data Archive). However, special procedures are put in place to restrict access to these anonymised data and they will always be released in a format that does not allow any individuals to be identified.