For the approach below you have to check for collisions, ie different name lead
to same masked value.
You could hash it. However in order to avoid that one can just try different
hashes you need to include in each name a different random factor.
However, the anonymization problem is bigger, because based on other fields and
correlation, the individual might still be identifiable.
> Am 16.03.2019 um 18:39 schrieb Mich Talebzadeh <mich.talebza...@gmail.com>:
>
> Hi,
>
> I am looking at Description column of a bank statement (CSV download) that
> has the following format
>
> scala> account_table.printSchema
> root
> |-- TransactionDate: date (nullable = true)
> |-- TransactionType: string (nullable = true)
> |-- Description: string (nullable = true)
> |-- Value: double (nullable = true)
> |-- Balance: double (nullable = true)
> |-- AccountName: string (nullable = true)
> |-- AccountNumber: string (nullable = true)
>
> The column description for BACS payments contains the name of the individual
> who paid into the third party account. I need to mask the name but cannot
> simply use a literal as below for all contents of descriptions column!
>
> f1.withColumn("Description", lit("*** Masked
> ***")).select('Description.as("Who paid")
>
> So I try the following combination
>
> f1.select(trim(substring(substring_index('Description, ",",
> 1),2,50)).as("name in clear"),
> reverse(regexp_replace(regexp_replace(regexp_replace(substring(regexp_replace('Description,
> "^['A-Z]", "XX"),2,6),"[A-F]","X")," ","X"),"[,]","R")).as("Masked")).show
> +------------------+------+
> | in clear|Masked|
> +------------------+------+
> | FATAH SABAH|HXTXXX|
> | C HIGGINSON|GIHXXX|
> | SOLTA A|XTLOSX|
> +------------------+------+
>
> This seems to work as it not only masks the name but also makes it consistent
> for all names (in other words, the same username gets the same mask).
>
> Are there any better alternatives?
>
> Thanks
>
> Dr Mich Talebzadeh
>
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