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Governance, Risk, Audit & Privacy · Intermediate

Anonymization

Irreversibly transforming personal data so individuals can no longer be identified by any means reasonably likely to be used.

Definition

Truly anonymized data falls outside GDPR. Techniques include generalization, suppression, aggregation, noise addition, and differential privacy. Achieving true anonymization is difficult because of linkage attacks, so effectiveness must be assessed against re-identification risk and periodically reviewed.

Example

Publishing only aggregated counts by region with small cells suppressed is a form of anonymization.

Exam tip

If a key exists to reverse it, it is pseudonymization, not anonymization.

Don't confuse it with

Related terms