Personal data protection for large scale public projects

I tried to get an answer to this over a year ago and thought I’d have another stab. I have a project that could be large scale. If I make it a private project then I would have to pre approve submitters which will be impractical. If I make it a public project, then all data can be seen by anybody who chooses to look. My problem is that I’d like the email address of the submitters for potential follow up. Under GDPR regulations, I have to inform the submitters when they join the project as to what personal data is collected and for what it purpose it will be used. I am unable to do this in a public project as the email addresses are visible to anyone. My original suggestion was to create a feature, perhaps at the form build level, that allows the project owner to determine what data is made available to the public. I don’t think GDPR is on the radar here as I just received an email from Epicollect to “Try our new Android app” and the email contained about 200 email addresses of other epicollect folks???

We are really sorry for the inconvenience, it will not happen again.
Please delete the email and ignore its content.

We are only trying to get some help from our community of users, If you are not interested, feel free to ignore any email from us.

Hi there. We are also interested in being able to decide which fields are public. Is there any intention to add this feature? Thanks

I’ve just discovered the ‘Hide’ option for columns in the Mapping Data tab. Given that columns can be hidden from download files, I would have thought it could also be applied to the data table and map?

To achieve what you are looking for, you will need to use a third-party visualisation tool.
Currently, we do not have any plans to add it to our platform, but we will add it to our to-do list. If there is a high number of requests, we might consider it.

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Thank you for your reply. Our issue isn’t about visualisation, but more about GDPR. We’d like to be able to contact users occasionally, but unless we make the project private, we can’t collect their email address without compromising user confidentiality. If a project has many users, it would be onerous to authorise each user to the project. This feature would be a great addition.

We have the same problem. We are planning a large citizen science project in which it is not feasible to register users but we still need to collect personal data: on the one hand, we have to give free access to the application to anyone on the other hand the data collected (at least the sensitive ones) must not be accessible to everyone.
This is a fairly common requirement for extensive data collection projects.
For public projects, it would be helpful to define, in the app’s design or in the mapping of the field, which confidential data are visible/accessible only to a small number of users and which are visible/accessible to everyone without restriction.

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This has been addressed here, which suggests this is not the best app to use for this use case: