Companies today have to be extremely careful not to let personal or private data get into the wrong hands. One way of doing this is called anonymization, which "shreds" information, allowing companies to share information about their customers with appropriate parties without revealing personal data. In effect, the process of anonymization creates digital signatures of information that can be compared against other signatures for possible matches. At the same time, the signatures cannot be used to recreate the original data. The risk to companies is that every time an organization makes a copy of its data and sends it someplace else, the risk of someone stealing it grows. And it's twice as hard to protect, since a copy exists. With anonymization, companies are protecting their own resources, as well as defending the privacy of customers.
To read more about the benefits of anonymization:
- read the article [1] at ComputerWorld
Links:
[1] http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9012698&source=rss_topic17