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Exactly What Is Computer Data Pseudonymization And Is The Record Actually Secure?
This blog post covers pseudonymization as one means of de-identifying or anonymizing sensitive data files.
The unauthorized use or misuse of our personally identifying information (or PII) for example name, social security number, date of birth, mother maiden name, place of birth, etc, could lead to identity theft as well as crimes related to impersonation, including humiliation, inconvenience and financial damage. For those businesses and organizations collecting PII yet not safeguarding it, there are serious legal as well as monetary ramifications.
Hospitals, government agencies, corporations, financial institutions and others who manage client and patient information containing PII have to abide by data privacy guidelines for instance the 1974 Privacy Act, and the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Some of these agencies must follow not just the statutory regulations, but expectations exclusive to a subset of the industry and their own in-house business guidelines.
Erika McCallister goes into great depth about shielding PII, as well as the methods of pseudonymization and de-identification.
According to Wikipedia, in addition to a few various online sources, pseudonymization is the technique of removing the relationship between data and the subject of the data, and incorporating an association between the file and an alternative identifier. It is the technique of depersonalizing the data in order that any distinguishing fields within the data are substituted by one or more false identifiers.
Private information is removed from a record and then replaced with a pseudonym (pseudo-name or unreal name) to protect the delicate name. The fields are made to appear credible. Utilizing a fake name helps protect delicate PII from unauthorized misuse because doing so strips away the individuals relationship to the other data in the record. Hence, the United States Department of Health and Human Services Health Information Knowledgebase maintains that using pseudo-identifiers can help in compliance with HIPAA policies with regards to suppression of patient identification information."
An Example of Pseudonymization
IRIs FieldShield version 2 program provides two choices for source field pseudonymization in the context of protecting PII:
1) Unrecoverable. This process uses a single-column source or set file holding first names, locations, or other values that are listed and also available for random selection rather than the original value. Because of the fact that there is no relationship between the first and unreal values, you have no method that will reverse this method if you want to show the original.
2) Recoverable. This procedure generates a two-column set file utilizing both actual and also fake information to establish a look-up table which you can use for both pseudonym display and later reinstatement of the pseudonym values by way of a reverse tracing.
IRI realized the benefit of this de-identification or pseudonymization method many years ago when using set files in its test data generating tool, RowGen. Test data quality is enhanced, without breaching privacy, while real-looking names substitute for real names.
For Added Security
Protection can be hampered when someone still can guess the target individual's true identity, possibly because there exists too many additional identifying components in the record. In these situations, it stands to reason to use other protections to the remaining areas. Another consideration/requirement of the pseudonymization technique regards reversability --the extent to which the actual data could be restored or the ease with which it could be carried out. It may therefore make sense to pseudonymize or cover up the data outright, without means of re-establishing the initial values.
Data Protecting And Data File Encryption Are Not The Same Things
It is a common misconception in the industry to use the terms data masking and data encryption interchangeably to mean the same things. Data masking and data encryption are two distinct processes as we will see in this article.
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