Discussion: Anonymization and Pseudonymization
Open Questions:
- How much socially and scientifically relevant information is lost through distortion strategies, and to what extent can fictionalized and distorted data still be meaningfully reused?
- Is it always possible to anticipate which information might pose a risk to research participants in the future? “We don’t know if the anonymization strategies in place now will still hold up twenty years from now, and […] what kind of information from my field might later be politically weaponized” (Behrends et al., 2022, p. 81Translated by Saskia Köbschall.).
- In many cases, anonymity cannot be guaranteed, as “the overall structure of personal information itself – that is, its individually specific context, for example, within the reconstruction of an individual biography – can theoretically allow re-identification despite the anonymization of detailed information” (Kretzer, 2013, p. 32Translated by Saskia Köbschall.). How can this be dealt with?
- It must also be considered that officially issued and archived research permits may enable the reconstruction of ethnographers’ identities as well as their research locations. How secure are pseudonymization strategies in such cases?
- The ongoing digitization process makes achieving anonymity increasingly difficult and requires careful consideration of field recording strategies (see interview with M. Kramer; Shklovski & Vertesi, 2013; Bachmann et al., 2017). Are secure forms of anonymization and pseudonymization still achievable in digitally networked worlds?
Literature
Bachmann, G., Knecht, M. & Wittel, A. (2017): The Social Productivity of Anonymity. Introduction. In: Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 17/2, 241–258. https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/31952/1/PubSub9418_Wittel.pdf
Behrends, A.; Knecht, M.; Liebelt, C.; Pauli, J.; Rao, U.; Rizzolli, M.; Röttger-Rössler, B.; Stodulka, T. and Zenker, O. (Eds.) (2022). Zur Teilbarkeit ethnographischer Forschungsdaten. Oder: Wie viel Privatheit braucht ethnographische Forschung? Ein Gedankenaustausch. SFB 1171 ‚Affective Societies‘ Working Paper Nr. 01/22. http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/refubium-35157.2
Kretzer, S. (2013): Arbeitspapier zur Konzeptentwicklung der Anonymisierungs-/Pseudonymisierung in Qualiservice. Open Access Repository. https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/handle/document/47605
Shklovski, I. & Vertesi, J. (2013). Un-Googling Publications. The Ethics and Problems of Anonymization. In CHI’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2169–2178. ACM Digital Library. https://doi.org/10.1145/2468356.2468737