What Exactly Is Computer Data Pseudonymization And Is The Information Actually Secure?
This blog thread covers pseudonymization as one means of de-identifying or anonymizing delicate data files.
The unlawful 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, can result in identity theft and other crimes associated with impersonation, not to mention shame, inconvenience and expenses. For all those institutions collecting PII but not protecting it, there are severe legal and economic ramifications.
Hospitals, government agencies, corporations, financial institutions and others who manage client as well as patient files containing PII must comply with data security laws for instance the 1974 Privacy Act, and the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Some of these agencies must conform to not just the statutory stipulations, but requirements specific to a subset of the industry as well as their own in-house business policies.
Erika McCallister explains in great depth with regard to protecting PII, and the procedures of pseudonymization and de-identification.
According to Wikipedia, as well as a few various web based sources, pseudonymization is the procedure of removing the association between data and the subject of that data, and then adding an association between the information and a substitute identifier. It is the technique of depersonalizing the file to ensure that any identifying fields within a record are substituted by one or more artificial identifiers.
Private information is removed from a record and then changed with a pseudonym (pseudo-name or fictitious name) to protect the sensitive name. The fields are placed to appear realistic. Utilizing a fake name helps safeguard vulnerable PII from unauthorized misuse because it removes the persons connection to the other data in the record. Hence, the United States Department of Health and Human Services Health Information Knowledgebase maintains that making use of pseudo-identifiers helps in compliance with HIPAA regulations regarding suppression of patient identification data."
An Example of Pseudonymization
IRIs FieldShield version 2 program provides two methods for source field pseudonymization in the context of covering PII:
1) Unrecoverable. This procedure makes use of a single-column source or set file containing first names, cities, or other values which are listed and also available for random selection rather than the initial value. Given that there is no association between the original and fictitious values, there is no means to reverse this method for you to display the original.
2) Recoverable. This method creates a two-column set file utilizing both true as well as false information to build a look-up table which can be used for both pseudonym display and later restoration of the pseudonym values through a reverse tracing.
IRI recognized the benefit of this de-identification or pseudonymization process years ago when working with set files in its test data generating application, RowGen. Test data quality is improved, without breaching privacy, when real-looking names substitute for actual names.
For Added Security
Privacy may possibly be jeopardized any time someone can still guess the target individual's real identity, possibly because there exists a lot of extra defining components in the record. In these cases, it makes sense to use other protections to the remaining areas. Another consideration/requirement of the pseudonymization procedure regards reversability --the scope to which the true data can be recovered or the simplicity with which it can be carried out. It may therefore make sense to pseudonymize or disguise the file outright, without any means of restoring the original values.
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