From the course: CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701) Cert Prep: 1 General Security Concepts
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Data de-identification
From the course: CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701) Cert Prep: 1 General Security Concepts
Data de-identification
One way that many organizations seek to protect themselves against accidental disclosures of personal information is to remove all identifying information from datasets, when that identifying information is not necessary to meet business requirements. Deidentification is the process of moving through a dataset and removing data that may be individually identifying. For example, you would certainly want to remove names, Social Security numbers, and other obvious identifiers. However, simple data deidentification is often insufficient to completely safeguard information. The reason for this is that you can often combine seemingly innocuous fields to uniquely identify an individual. A study done at Carnegie Mellon University analyze three fields commonly retained in deidentified datasets; zip code, date of birth, and gender. You wouldn't think that any one of these fields, when used alone, would allow you to identify someone. After all, a lot of people live in the same town as me, and…