The ICO has published a code of practice on managing the data protection risks relating to anonymisation. The new code can be found here.
The code has been published in response to the increased amount of anonymised data that the UK is putting into the public domain. This has the risk of re-identification of individuals (turning anonymised data back into personal data through the use of data matching or similar techniques). The code provides guidance - including examples of anonymisation techniques - so that anonymisation can make information derived from personal data available in a form that is rich and usable, whilst protecting individual data subjects.
The ICO suggests that this is the first code of practice to be published by any European data protection authority on the topic. This will be useful, for example, to organisations (i) dealing with requests for information that contains third party personal data made under the Freedom of Information Act, (ii) wanting to make themselves more transparent and accountable to the public or (iii) intending to assist with research or the compilation of statistics by making their anonymised data available to researchers.
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