Today, every company deals with a huge amount of personal data, which includes names and dates of birth, addresses and phone numbers, salary and payment details, and other confidential information. Our data is completely legally processed by accountants, healthcare professionals, retailers, analysts, bank employees, telecom operators, and other users. Obviously, all this data must be properly protected as it is the target of hacker attacks. For example, more than 155.8 million Americans lost their personal information in 2020, according to Statista. This is confirmed by our graphics based on the Statista data.
Source: Statista
There are many solutions used to protect personal data. Companies protect their infrastructures and transmission networks from unauthorized access, encrypt data, make backups, and fight various types of fraud. Not only cybercriminals are responsible for data breaches. Tough users, negligent employees, or broken information systems can easily compromise sensitive information.
Several years ago, the National Health Service (NHS) recorded 140 data breaches due to security issues, while a faulty malfunctioning backup system at Marin Medical Practices resulted in the loss of the personal information of 5,000 patients. Data masking or data anonymization is one of the solutions that can solve this issue and protect your personal data.
What is Data Anonymization and How Can It Be Applied?
Data anonymization is the depersonalization of information in order to protect it. This process involves encrypting or deleting personal data (names, addresses, medical diagnoses, salaries, and so on) from datasets (databases, logs, files, etc.) to allow the holders of this information to stay anonymous. The aim of these procedures is to prevent attackers from tracking information about owners.
Displaying payment card numbers in mobile apps and online banks is the most primitive example of data masking. The characters in the numbers are most often hidden with asterisks, leaving only the last four characters so that an attacker can’t see the whole payment card number.
Data anonymization is used in most industries that deal with sensitive information, such as healthcare, finance, communication, and others. This measure reduces the risk of inadvertent information disclosure when exchanging data between countries, branches, and even departments of the same company. It doesn’t allow hackers to steal your personal identity.
For example, if a hospital wants to share confidential patient data with a medical research laboratory or pharmaceutical company, it must do it in an ethical manner, keeping its patients anonymous. For this purpose, the hospital must remove their names, social security numbers, dates of birth, and addresses from the general list, while leaving important components necessary for medical research, such as age, height, weight, gender, race, disease, and so on.
You can anonymize your customers’ data when working with CRM platforms. If a client card contains a name, phone number, address, place of work, account balance, and other confidential data, full information should be available only to the head of the department or authorized employees. Other managers should have access to the client’s full name and phone number only. Data masking will help you ensure confidentiality if you need to show this card to other departments.
If a company develops software, it must test its solutions. To test all the features of the application, testers need a real copy of the product. It is impossible to delete all important information from the copy as this will violate the integrity of the data structure. Moreover, if the database is broken, your app won’t work correctly. In this case, you can apply data masking by replacing the initial information with a similar one. The integrity of the database will not be compromised, and you can give the copy to the in-house or outsourced testing team. Data masking will save your valuable data.
Data anonymization helps companies comply with the GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA requirements that regulate the collection, processing, storage, and dissemination of personal data. Their main purpose is to protect personal data according to human rights. Each company is obliged to ensure the security of the storage of personal data using any available data anonymization tools.
Does Everything that Gets into the World Wide Web Go Public?
Unfortunately, sometimes the data protection measures are not always effective, and failures occur. In April 2021, Business Inside reported that Facebook faced the largest personal data leakage when the names, phone numbers, addresses, and other confidential information of 533 million users from 106 countries became public.
At the same time, Facebook takes all necessary measures to protect personal information. Your account data is on a secure server with a firewall. When you enter confidential information like a payment card number or password, the system encrypts this data using SSL technology.
The Harvard University students conducted research and revealed that data masking doesn’t ensure that a person’s identity is not disclosed. Researchers created a tool that processes huge amounts of consumer data sets that went public due to hacking activities or negligence. They used all the databases that leaked to the Internet since 2015. Although many of these databases contained anonymized information, students managed to find real users.
Moreover, British scientists developed a similar instrument based on machine learning that was able to correctly identify 99.98% of Americans in any anonymous dataset using only 15 characteristics. The same results were demonstrated by the MIT researchers who identified 90% of users with the help of 4 basic parameters.
So, is data anonymization unable to protect us? No, it’s not true. We just need a reliable and secure solution that cannot be hacked or broken. Let’s take a look at 3 promising data anonymization instruments designed to protect sensitive information used in a variety of industries.
How Data Anonymization Platforms Protect Personal Data in Different Branches
Retail
Retail companies collect and process large amounts of data to offer customers what they want and increase their profit. They often use loyalty cards to get useful information. The loyalty cards can tell stores what products were purchased, how much money was spent, how often purchases were made, and much more. All this information allows the retailer to understand what products to offer you.
Browsing the catalog and website allows stores to make a conclusion about consumer preferences, socio-demographic status, income level, family composition, the presence of a car, pets, and so on. Registering with the store through social networks gives marketers access to your profile, which helps them create more relevant offers.
It’s obvious that retailers need a robust tool that will help them comply with the data protection regulations and keep their customers anonymous. Swedish platform Indivd is an innovative solution that was made for retailers to help them obtain customer data without compromising their privacy.
Telecommunication
Like retailers, telecom companies use personal data to analyze the behavior of customers or Internet users, tracking which websites they visit, where they are located, what services they buy, which apps they use, and much more. Personal data helps operators increase their revenues. Interesting and flexible offers retain customers and attract new ones while big data analytics allow product managers to develop new powerful strategies.
Irish developers created Truata, a solution that allows telecommunication companies to securely use their customers’ personal data. They offer operators to use of an anonymization service, privacy-enhanced analytics platform, and other tools that meet the highest data protection regulatory standards.
Healthcare
Healthcare facilities also need data masking solutions as they deal with patients’ personal data, including their names, addresses, diagnoses, insurance numbers, genders, and other sensitive information. Elinext offers a data anonymization application that allows healthcare providers to automate workflows, speed up data collection and processing, as well as ensure the security of patients’ personal information.
Bottom Line
People care about privacy, according to Cisco research. It demonstrated that almost 50% of respondents are ready to switch providers or companies that are unable to protect their personal information. That’s why data anonymization solutions are a great option for those businesses that want to retain their customers and observe the data security regulations. Developers, in turn, create reliable instruments that help businesses engaged in different branches to keep confidential information.
