anonymizer

anonymizer anonymizes data containing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) using a combination of salting and hashing. You can find quality examples of data anonymization in R here, here, and here.

Installation

You can install:

• the latest released version from CRAN with

  install.packages("anonymizer")

• the latest development version from github with

  if (packageVersion("devtools") < 1.6) {
    install.packages("devtools")
  }
  devtools::install_github("paulhendricks/anonymizer")

If you encounter a clear bug, please file a minimal reproducible example on github.

API

anonymzer employs four convenience functions: salt, unsalt, hash, and anonymize.

library(dplyr, warn.conflicts = FALSE)
library(anonymizer)
letters %>% head
#> [1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" "f"
letters %>% head %>% salt(.seed = 1)
#> [1] "gjoxfagjoxf" "gjoxfbgjoxf" "gjoxfcgjoxf" "gjoxfdgjoxf" "gjoxfegjoxf"
#> [6] "gjoxffgjoxf"
letters %>% head %>% salt(.seed = 1) %>% unsalt(.seed = 1)
#> [1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" "f"
letters %>% head %>% hash(.algo = "crc32")
#> [1] "c0749952" "597dc8e8" "2e7af87e" "b01e6ddd" "c7195d4b" "5e100cf1"
letters %>% head %>% salt(.seed = 1) %>% hash(.algo = "crc32")
#> [1] "b0891ad8" "361d6876" "fd41bbd3" "e0448b6b" "2b1858ce" "ad8c2a60"
letters %>% head %>% anonymize(.algo = "crc32", .seed = 1)
#> [1] "b0891ad8" "361d6876" "fd41bbd3" "e0448b6b" "2b1858ce" "ad8c2a60"

Generate data containing fake PII

library(generator)
n <- 6
set.seed(1)
ashley_madison <- 
  data.frame(name = r_full_names(n), 
             snn = r_national_identification_numbers(n), 
             dob = r_date_of_births(n), 
             email = r_email_addresses(n), 
             ip = r_ipv4_addresses(n), 
             phone = r_phone_numbers(n), 
             credit_card = r_credit_card_numbers(n), 
             lat = r_latitudes(n), 
             lon = r_longitudes(n), 
             stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
knitr::kable(ashley_madison, format = "markdown")

Detect data containing PII

library(detector)
ashley_madison %>% 
  detect %>% 
  knitr::kable(format = "markdown")

Anonymize data containing PII

ashley_madison[] <- lapply(ashley_madison, anonymize, .algo = "crc32")
ashley_madison %>% 
  knitr::kable(format = "markdown")