Practical Data Privacy

Chapter 1. Data Governance and Simple Privacy Approaches

Data privacy is a large and long-lived field. I want you to picture it like an old road, packed with interesting side streets and diversions but hard to navigate if you don’t know the way. This chapter is your initial orientation to this road. In this chapter and throughout this book, I’ll help you map important parts of the privacy landscape, and you’ll find areas where you want to learn more and deviate from the original path. Applying this map within your organization means uncovering who is doing what, what their responsibilities are, and what data privacy needs exist in your organization.¹

You might have heard the phrase data governance only once or hundreds of times, but it is often left unexplained or open for interpretation. In this chapter, you’ll learn where data governance overlaps with data privacy for practical data science purposes and learn simpler approaches for solving privacy problems with data, such as pseudonymization. You’ll also learn how governance techniques like documentation and lineage tracking can help identify privacy problems or ways to implement privacy techniques at the appropriate step.

Tip

If you already know or work in data governance, I recommend skimming or skipping this chapter. If governance and data management are new to you, this chapter will show you the foundations needed to apply the advanced techniques you’ll learn in later chapters.

This chapter will help give you tools and ...