Understanding The Process Of Data Anonymisation In The Context Of Data Privacy Laws

“Anonymised data can never be totally anonymous”¹. A big concern of anonymisation of data, is its de-anonymisation, which is the process of using information from different data sets to re-create the anonymised data. For instance, A research team at the University of Texas at Austin, wanted to demonstrate how de-anonymisation could take place with very little information. As a result, with a background information available from IMDB, they successfully identified many records of Netflix users. This was consequently used to find out their sensitive information and political preferences.²

In India, ‘Anonymisation' is dealt with under the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019. The consequences of personal data falling into the wrong hands or handled carelessly by data principals are catastrophic; which is why it is included in the framework of privacy jurisprudence.