Question

A financial services company pseudonymizes customer records used by its analytics team by replacing account numbers with tokens. The mapping table that links tokens back to real account numbers is stored in the same analytics database, accessible to the same analysts who query the pseudonymized data. A privacy engineer reviewing the design is concerned the pseudonymization provides little real risk reduction. What is the MOST important control to implement to strengthen the pseudonymization?

Accepted Answer

Store the token-to-identifier mapping table separately with access restricted to personnel who do not use the pseudonymized data

Answer

Increase the length and randomness of the tokens so they cannot be guessed

Answer

Encrypt the entire analytics database at rest using a strong algorithm

Answer

Replace pseudonymization with full anonymization by deleting the mapping table entirely