Is it really true that we can't anonymize data? If that's true, then are we wasting time in looking at any type of obfuscation process or scripting for data that we restore to non-production environments? If that is true, then we then need secure development environments and treat them like production servers as far as security and access controls go.

It's somewhat amusing that the reason we can't likely anonymize data anymore is because we have too much of it. All the different data sets that can be cross referenced, suing public data, make the success rate of anonymizing techniques low. I don't know how practical it is for someone to actually combine data sets from public sources and using the information to determine the identities of people from other data sets. I do know, however, that there are lots of smart people out there with access to cheap computing resources and lots of spare time on their hands. This might be 21st century vandalism, and we, as data professionals, will be the people that have to deal with it.

Does this mean that we should not bother to obfuscate or change production data that is copied to development systems? I don't think that's the case. In many environments there might not be enough information for someone to identify the original rows. Especially if you protect all of your data systems, ensuring that web logs and other potentially related source of information are not readily available. Even a rogue developer might not be able to unravel the anonymization if you keep separate data sets secure and limit the number of people that could combine them.

Steve Jones

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