Practice and Challenges of (De-)Anonymisation for Data Sharing

Personal data is a necessity in many fields for research and innovation purposes, and when such data is shared, the data controller carries the responsibility of protecting the privacy of the individuals contained in their dataset. The removal of direct identifiers, such as full name and address, is not enough to secure the privacy of individuals as shown by de-anonymisation methods in the scientific literature. Data controllers need to become aware of the risks of de-anonymisation and apply the appropriate anonymisation measures before sharing their datasets, in order to comply with privacy regulations. To address this need, we defined a procedure that makes data controllers aware of the de-anonymisation risks and helps them in deciding the anonymisation measures that need to be taken in order to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We showcase this procedure with a customer relationship management (CRM) dataset provided by a telecommunications provider. Finally, we recount the challenges we identified during the definition of this procedure and by putting existing knowledge and tools into practice.

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