Pseudonymisation is a data protection technique that replaces personally identifiable information with artificial identifiers or pseudonyms. This helps reduce privacy risks while still allowing data to be used for analysis and processing. Unlike anonymisation, it allows the original data to be recovered, if you have access to the lookup table that maps pseudonyms back to the original value.
Easy Data Transform can quickly and securely pseudonymise columns of personally identifiable information in your data.
- Pseudonyms are assigned in a random order for greater security.
- You can set the pseudonym prefix and the starting number in the sequence.
- Pseudonyms are padded with 0s to all be the same length.
You can create both a pseudonymised dataset and a lookup table to reverse the pseudonymisation in a few clicks.
See the video above for a simple example of pseudonymisation, showing how to pseudonymise a healthcare dataset and create a psuedonym lookup table.
Easy Data Transform also supports hashing, where an algorithm is used to convert text into a different string using an algorithm, such as SHA-256. However pseudonyms are generally preferable to hashing for hiding personal information because hashes:
- Tend to be much longer.
- Can (in theory, at least) be reversed.
- Can (in theory, at least) result in ‘collisions’, where 2 different values have the same hash.
Note that Easy Data Transform can also reverse the pseudonymisation using a Lookup transform.
As well as pseudonymising data, Easy Data Transform can help with cleaning, blending, filtering and analysing your data. All without coding. Download the free trial and try it yourself.
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