Anonymisation software

Municipality of Waalwijk

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 5th of September 2024, at 14:30 (CET) | Publication Standard 1.0

• Publication category: Other algorithms
• Impact assessment: DPIA
• Status: In use

General information

Theme

Organisation and business operations

Begin date

2022-05

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 Waalwijk has to deal with various laws and regulations whereby the municipality actively discloses information on request. This information may contain privacy-sensitive information. In doing so, it is important that this information is anonymised. Anonymising data by hand is a time-consuming task that also involves errors and data leaks. DataMask's software enables users to anonymise personal and confidential information themselves in an efficient manner.

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

Impact assessment

Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA)

Operations

Data

Field not filled in.

Technical design

Smart features, such as set rules or templates, allow anonymisation on a document-by-document or bulk basis. In this way, the manner and degree of anonymisation of documents frequently used by the municipality can also be set by default. The software then uses pattern recognition and Natural Language Processing to search for names, addresses, dates of birth, specific set words, signatures or regular expressions (such as e-mail, IBAN, BSN). The DataMask software recognises these and makes suggestions to mask or anonymise them fully automatically.

External provider

Datamask BV