Question

hospital system wants to protect the personally identifiable information of its patients, such as names and medical records. They ask their data team to anonymize the data. What techniques might they use to achieve this goal? Select all that apply.




Blanking



Masking



Sorting

Answer 1

Blanking and Masking.

- Blanking (redaction/suppression) removes or replaces sensitive fields (e.g., replacing a name with a blank or “REDACTED”).
- Masking obfuscates data (e.g., showing only last 4 digits of an ID, or replacing characters with Xs).

Sorting does not anonymize data — it only reorders records and can still leave PII exposed.