Anonymisation software

Municipality of Noordwijk

The algorithm underlines personal data in documents. An employee has to look at all pages and check whether the document is properly anonymised. Then the software removes all highlighted information and blacklists it. After that, the documents can be published, for example under the Open Government Act (WOO).

Last change on 17th of December 2024, at 14:22 (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

2021-03

Contact information

[e-mail]

Responsible use

Goal and impact

The anonymisation software is used to anonymise documents published by the municipality faster and better. In this way, we prevent data leaks and contribute to better protection of data subjects' AVG rights.

Considerations

The municipality of Noordwijk increasingly has to make information public. Therefore, privacy- or business-sensitive information has to be masked out. The advantage of the anonymisation software is that anonymisation is faster and better than with a manual approach.

Human intervention

The outcome of the algorithm is always checked by an employee.

Risk management

There is no risk of automated decision-making and the algorithm has no impact on fundamental rights because the algorithm does not make decisions with legal consequences. It only suggests anonymising personal data. If the algorithm does not work well enough, we can make adjustments with black- and whitelists. The municipality employee always does the final test of whether a document has been anonymised correctly.

Legal basis

WOO & AVG.

Operations

Data

All information found in the uploaded documents (except metadata) is processed by the algorithm. This may include ordinary personal data, special personal data and criminal data. It may also include business-sensitive information.

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

Xxllnc