1. What is the general goal of the feature?
Allow for the encryption of selected questions only (in most cases these questions would either contain sensitive data or all for the identification of individual people or households).
2. What are some example use cases for this feature?
One of the main barriers to more widespread use of encryption is the fear of data loss due to the technical issues or the loss of decryption credentials in an unexpected event.
In a form containing data which covers non-sensitive subjects but includes a small number of fields which could be used to identify individuals providing data (name, GPS etc.), being able to encrypt only these questions would avoid any perceived risks to the majority of the data which is valuable for analysis while also ensuring a level of data protection which is higher than most teams are currently implementing.
It would also mean that after exporting the data, a reduced number of staff would be able to decrypt the relevant fields but the data could be easily shared with other team members and analysed in an anonymised form.
3. What can you contribute to making this feature a reality?
While very much interested in building my software development skills, I would not be well placed to tackle such a topic currently and would realistically only be able to contribute the idea and of course promote use of the functionality if it becomes a possibility someday. My main goal for this post is to assess if others consider the use cases above to be relevant or if there are other expected developments which could be considered to make this idea obsolete.