How do we ensure anonymisation is effective?
What should our anonymisation process seek to achieve?
An effective anonymisation process seeks to reduce the likelihood of someone being identified or identifiable to a sufficiently remote level. This level depends on a number of factors specific to the context.
It may seem fairly easy to say whether a piece of information relates to an identified individual, as this may be clear from the information itself. For example, bank statements clearly identify individual account holders and contain information that relates to them. anonymisation processes should take into account the concept of identifiability in its broadest sense. They should not simply focus on removing obvious information that clearly relates to someone.