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Amnesia – High-Accuracy Data Anonymization

amnesia.openaire.eu

21–30 of 99 posts

Re: Amnesia – High-Accuracy Data Anonymization

#21
post #10

If you're interested in tools such as Amnesia, you might also want to take a look at ARX, which supports much more anonymization methods, including Differential Privacy: https://arx.deidentifier.org https://github.com/arx-deidentifier/arx Disclosure: I'm the main author of ARX.

And has a huge advantage: it runs local.

Re: Amnesia – High-Accuracy Data Anonymization

#22

This is not easy. This is not an easy thing to do and protect the data. Please don’t call this easy.

Schools think it's enough anonymization to call pupils by their initials while mailing back and forth grades and sensitive data and characterizations about them. It's a rampant problem.

Re: Amnesia – High-Accuracy Data Anonymization

#23
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then get informed consent

That's a must. In some countries this is now automated at the government level, Belgium for instance has an excellent consent mechanism for medical data.

Right. But that still involves anonymizing data.

I'd also point out that there is a huge amount of COVID data being shared at the moment and, outside of vaccine trials, I'd be pretty certain a lot of it is not under any sort of informed consent. (As is true of a lot of population statistics generally.)

Re: Amnesia – High-Accuracy Data Anonymization

#25
post #10

If you're interested in tools such as Amnesia, you might also want to take a look at ARX, which supports much more anonymization methods, including Differential Privacy: https://arx.deidentifier.org https://github.com/arx-deidentifier/arx Disclosure: I'm the main author of ARX.

And has a huge advantage: it runs local.

Amnesia doesn't...? Then what's the download link and github page for?

Re: Amnesia – High-Accuracy Data Anonymization

#26
post #5

Fair warning: anonymization is a hard problem. It is never easy, and you'd be surprised how many bits can leak out of what you thought was properly anonymized data. If you are using data for test purposes please use generated data, not anonymized data. This has the additional advantage that there is no potential path for live data to end up on a developers machine. added in edit: And also realize that just using a se…

What about building machine learning models that make predictions on said data? Can't just test on fake data.

ARX (see other comment in this thread) also supports data anonymization for privacy-preserving machine learning.

Re: Amnesia – High-Accuracy Data Anonymization

#27
post #5

Fair warning: anonymization is a hard problem. It is never easy, and you'd be surprised how many bits can leak out of what you thought was properly anonymized data. If you are using data for test purposes please use generated data, not anonymized data. This has the additional advantage that there is no potential path for live data to end up on a developers machine. added in edit: And also realize that just using a se…

Agree with your point about anonymization, but here is a call out for generated data too: if the objective is to build a model, you might end up losing information, or worse, your model might end up modelling the assumptions in the generation process.

Re: Amnesia – High-Accuracy Data Anonymization

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And has a huge advantage: it runs local.

Amnesia doesn't...? Then what's the download link and github page for?

The Readme is not user friendly and doesn't explain how to use or install the software. In the Github issue the developer points to an installation documentation that throws a 404 error.

In my opinion, this source code was put out to appear "open" to the H2020 Programme, but they have no intention in actually helping users run the code locally.

Re: Amnesia – High-Accuracy Data Anonymization

#30
post #27
post #5

Fair warning: anonymization is a hard problem. It is never easy, and you'd be surprised how many bits can leak out of what you thought was properly anonymized data. If you are using data for test purposes please use generated data, not anonymized data. This has the additional advantage that there is no potential path for live data to end up on a developers machine. added in edit: And also realize that just using a se…

Agree with your point about anonymization, but here is a call out for generated data too: if the objective is to build a model, you might end up losing information, or worse, your model might end up modelling the assumptions in the generation process.

Yes, that's absolutely valid. This too is hard. But then again, if it were easy everybody would be doing it so consider it a problem that when solved properly becomes part of your moat and a thing that you could easily mention in a sales process to ensure a level playing field with other parties pitching.
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