Anonymous data v. personal data - a false debate: an EU perspective on anonymization, pseudonymization and personal data

Abstract

This era of big data analytics promises many things. In particular, it offers opportunities to extract hidden value from unstructured raw datasets through novel reuse. The reuse of personal data is, however, a key concern for data protection law as it involves processing for purposes beyond those that justified its original collection, at odds with the principle of purpose limitation. The issue becomes one of balancing the private interests of individuals and realizing the promise of big data. One way to resolve this issue is to transform the personal data that will be shared for further processing, such as data mining, into ―anonymous information‖ to use an EU legal term. "Anonymous information" is outside the scope of data protection laws in the EU, and is also carved out from privacy laws in many other jurisdictions worldwide. The foregoing solution works well in theory, but only as long as the output potential from the data still retains utility, which is not necessarily the case in practice. This is because the value or knowledge that can be gained from analyzing datasets (particularly using automatic algorithmic software) is maximized by virtue of finding patterns, basically linking relationships between data points. Anonymization, by contrast, aims to delink such data point relationships where they relate to informational knowledge that can be gleaned in respect of specific persons and their identities. This leaves those in charge of processing the data with a problem: how can they ensure that anonymization is conducted effectively on the data on their possession, while retaining that data‘s utility for potential future disclosure to, and further processing by, a third party?

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Identifiers

ORCID for Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon: orcid.org/0000-0003-3715-1219

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