Anonymisation software

Municipality of Culemborg

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

Last change on 8th of April 2024, at 17:05 (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

2023-12

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 the individuals and companies to whom the documents relate, on the other.

Considerations

The municipality of Culemborg has to deal with various laws and regulations under which 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. Using DataMask's software, users themselves are able to anonymise personal and confidential information efficiently.

Human intervention

The documents anonymised by means of the software can be checked by an employee afterwards. 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
• UAVG: https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0040940
• Wep: https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0043961
• Wdo: https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0048156

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 fed into the algorithm. The algorithm detects the data to be masked within these documents. The employee makes the choice of 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 BV

Link to code base

https://datamask.nl/over-datamask