The Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (Cnil), in its deliberation No. 98-005 of 27 January 1998, issued a favourable notice relating to the processing and diffusion of the DADS. This authorisation was extended to the processing of all employees and their employers at the beginning of 2006. Since 2013, a decree specific to annual social data declarations (Decree No. 2013-506 of 14 June 2013) simplifies the situation and governs INSEE's access to DADS. The processing of personal data relating to the nominative social declaration (DSN) was created by Decree 2013-266 of 28 March 2013 relating to the nominative social declaration (Articles 3 et seq.). This decree is regularly updated to keep pace with developments in the DSN standard. The data in the All employees database is classified as "high protection", in accordance with the report of 28 June 2002 on the security of information systems.

With regard to the public diffusion of data, any table intended for external diffusion must under no circumstances allow the direct or indirect identification of an employee, an establishment or an enterprise. This principle of statistical confidentiality is enshrined in French law (Act 51-711 of 7 June 1951) and in European law (Regulation No. (EC) 223/2009). It is specified in the European Statistics Code of Practice (principle 5).

For tables at place of residence, the criteria are as follows:

• no cell should have less than 5 employees ;

• no employee should account for more than 80 % of the payroll of the cell.

For tables at the place of work, the criteria are, in addition to the two previous criteria, the following:

• no box should relate to less than 3 establishments (or enterprises);

• no single establishment (or enterprise) should account for more than 85% of each quantity surveyed in the cell.

A box showing, for example, the number of jobs, the volume of hours and the wage bill can only be shown if there are at least 3 enterprises and no single enterprise accounts for 85% of the workforce, 85% of the volume of hours or 85% of the wage bill.

For organisations operating within the framework of a public service mission, requests for access must be addressed directly to the producing services.

For the general public, the All employees database exists in the form of "reduced version" or "superanonymised" detail files. These files only contain data relating to the current year.

Finally, a condition, recalled by the Cnil, must be that they do not allow the identification, even indirectly, of individuals and companies. To this end, certain variables are proposed in brackets only (e.g. salaries).

From the 2002 validity, the "superanonymised" files are :

• a "jobs" file for the whole of France as at 12ᵉ;

• an "employee" or "main job" file for the whole of France as at 12ᵉ