Anonymisation software

Municipality of Doesburg

Among other things, the algorithm recognises and anonymises (personal) data and confidential (financial) data in documents before they are published, for example on the basis of the Open Government Act

Last change on 9th of April 2024, at 8:56 (CET) | Publication Standard 1.0

• Publication category: Other algorithms
• Impact assessment: Field not filled in.
• Status: In use

General information

Theme

Organisation and business operations

Begin date

11-2021

Contact information

[e-mail]

Responsible use

Goal and impact

The anonymisation software is used to give substance to transparency on the one hand and the necessary protection of personal data that may appear in municipal documents on the other.

Considerations

The municipality deals with various laws and regulations where the municipality actively discloses information upon request. This information may contain privacy-sensitive information. In doing so, it is important that this information is anonymised. Manually anonymising data is a time-consuming task that also involves errors and data leaks. DataMask's software enables users to anonymise personal and confidential information efficiently.

Human intervention

The documents anonymised through the software are checked by an employee before publication. The employee determines whether the document has been correctly anonymised. The algorithm itself is retrained periodically.

Risk management

Risk is minimal because DataMask does not make decisions. DataMask makes a proposal for anonymising data and information. The municipality employee always does the final check whether a document is correctly anonymised.

Legal basis

WOO and AVG

Links to legal bases

• WOO: https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0045754/
• AVG: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/NL/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:31995L0046

Operations

Data

This depends on the document being anonymised. Examples include personal data such as e-mail addresses, phone numbers, bank account numbers, address details and signatures. And based on the Open Government Act (Woo), it can also include data beyond personal data. These grounds for exception are listed in the Woo.

Technical design

Documents are entered into the software. The algorithm detects the data to be masked within these documents. The employee chooses which data to mask. The outcome is a document on which the necessary data is masked. In the training of this algorithm by the supplier, no data from the municipality are used.

External provider

Datamask