anonymisation

Anonymisation is the process of ensuring that personal data cannot be retrieved from a dataset. Anonymisation is used to protect privacy and may be required by legislation such as GDPR or as part of ethics approval.

Full anonymisation will often destroy linkage between data, for example, the ability to see that a hospital and family doctor record refer to the same perosn, hence weaker pseudonomisation may be used in these cases.

Note that anonymisation is important, but not sufficient for ensuring ethical use of data. The data may still be used in ways that the original data subject would not have approved, a breach of personal data sovereighty. Furthermore, it may also make it difficult or impossible to remove data about an individual. In addition, total anonymisation is difficult as data may be de-anonymised by algorithms that look for relationships of the data to other non-anonymous datasets.