This blog thread addresses pseudonymization as one method of de-identifying or anonymizing delicate data.
The unauthorized use or misuse of our personally identifying information (or PII) like name, social security number, date of birth, mother maiden name, place of birth, etc, could lead to identity theft and other crimes associated with impersonation, not to mention embarrassment, inconvenience and expense. For those institutions collecting PII and not protecting it, there are severe legal and financial ramifications.
Hospitals, government agencies, corporations, financial institutions and others who maintain client and patient files containing PII have to comply with data security laws like the 1974 Privacy Act, and the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Some of these organizations must follow not just the statutory stipulations, but expectations specific to a subset of the industry as well as their own internal business rules.
Erika McCallister goes into great depth with regard to safeguarding PII, and the procedures of pseudonymization and de-identification.
According to Wikipedia, and a few other online sources, pseudonymization is the procedure of removing the relationship between data and the subject of that data, and then adding an association between the data and a substitute identifier. It is the process of depersonalizing the data to ensure that any determining fields within a record are exchanged by one or more artificial identifiers.
Personal data is removed from a record and replaced with a pseudonym (pseudo-name or fictitious name) to protect the delicate name. The fields are placed to seem realistic. Using a fake name can help protect vulnerable PII from unauthorized misuse since it gets rid of the persons association to the remaining data in the record. Thus, the United States Department of Health and Human Services Health Information Knowledgebase maintains that using pseudo-identifiers helps in compliance with HIPAA laws regarding suppression of patient identification data."
An Example of Pseudonymization
IRIs FieldShield version 2 software provides two options for source field pseudonymization in the context of shielding PII:
1) Unrecoverable. This procedure makes use of a single-column source or set file holding first names, cities, or other values which are listed and available for random selection in place of the original value. Given that there is no relationship between the original and fictitious values, there is no way to reverse this process if you wish to display the original.
2) Recoverable. This process creates a two-column set file by using both real and false data to create a look-up table which can be used for both pseudonym display and later recovery of the pseudonym values through a reverse query.
IRI recognized the value of this de-identification or pseudonymization process long ago when using set files in its test data generating application, RowGen. Test data quality is increased, without breaching privacy, when real-looking names take the place of actual names.
For Extra Security
Security is generally jeopardized any time someone still can guess the target individual's real identity, probably because there are a lot of other identifying components in the record. In these instances, it makes sense to utilize other protections to the remaining fields. Another consideration/requirement of the pseudonymization method regards reversability --the extent to which the true data could be recovered or the simplicity with which it can be accomplished. It may therefore make sense to pseudonymize or mask the data outright, without any means of re-establishing the original values.
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