Anonymization is great, but don’t undervalue pseudonymization

Phil Lee writes:

Earlier this week, the Article 29 Working Party published its Opinion 05/2014 on Anonymisation Techniques.  The opinion describes (in quite some technical detail) the different anonymisation techniques available to data controllers, their relative values, and makes some good practice suggestions – noting that “Once a dataset is truly anonymised and individuals are no longer identifiable, European data protection law no longer applies“.

This is a very significant point – data, once truly anonymised, is no longer subject to European data protection law.

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