Question 1
A hospital is digitizing its patient records. The privacy architect needs to decide on a technology to protect patient data stored in the database, such that data analysts can run queries on trends and statistics without accessing individually identifiable health information. The chosen method must irreversibly prevent the re-identification of any single patient from the dataset. Which Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET) should be used?
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: C
The key requirement is to irreversibly prevent re-identification. This is the definition of anonymization. Techniques like pseudonymization and encryption are reversible (with the right key or mapping table) and thus the data remains personal data. Data masking obscures data but may not fully prevent re-identification. Anonymization, through methods like k-anonymity or l-diversity, aims to make it impossible to link data back to an individual.