More tools to check out...

[DorienHuijser]

I did a search in the github topics privacy-engineering and privacy-tools. There are already quite some tools ánd overviews that we could refer to.

Note: this is a preselection, I honestly have no idea how useful, user-friendly and well-maintained these tools are. I did try to filter out repos that were really old and had very few stars/watchers, or that just seemed very basic.

Other overview-like repos

• awesome-privacy-engineering
• PrivacyTools - Desktop Tools - someone's personal tool list, not focused on research but an overview nonetheless.

Not so useful:

• anonymousland
• awesome-privacy
• AwesomePrivacyEngineering - rather limited list

Deidentification

• mysto: python package for deidentifying data.
• Anonimatron: command-line tool for pseudonymising SQL data (I think it's SQL)
• anonymizet-mysql: clone mySQL databases using self-defined rules
• anonymizer: this looks like a SQL synthetic database generator, but I'm not 100% sure
• anonymize-it: Python code to replace real values with artificial ones (looks like anonymouus to me)
• strm-privacy-diagnostics: python package to assess a.o. k-anonymity, l-diversity, t-closeness.
• ACRO: Tools for the Automatic Checking of Research Outputs: Python package to check SDC, but not sure how it works
• MaskMyPy: Python package for masking geographic point data in GeoDataFrames.
• open diffix: anonymisation for structured data (I'm guessing SQL data) (github)
• DeepPrivacy2: Python toolbox for image anonymization (face or full-body)
• DataMasker: data masking for SQL databases.
• Manual data masking: javascript library to help manually select text to be masked/replaced
• Health data anonymization tools: cleaning FHIR and DICOM files
• Audio editing tools
• Metadata removal tools

Listed in places but really old:

• UTD Anonymization toolbox
• Cornell Anonymization toolkit
• Open Anonymizer

Encryption

Some more encryption tools in this subsection and this subsection. Otherwise I think the list we have right now is already quite ok. It's often difficult to assess the security of the encryption algorithms so I'm hesitant to include more tools.

Synthetic data

• DPSyn, an algorithm for synthesizing microdata while satisfying differential privacy
• Pynonymizer: "replaces personally identifiable data in your database with realistic pseudorandom data, from the Faker library or from other functions."
• synthea: patient generator, so purely generative. Not sure if we decided to leave those out?

Secure computing and differential privacy

To be honest there are too many of these tools out there. Perhaps we could just refer to the existing overviews for this:

• Several tools for homomorphic encryption
• Privacy analysis tools
• Differential privacy and federated learning (does not only include tools though, also resources).

[DorienHuijser]

Action points:

• [x] @qubixes adds Pynonymizer to the synthetic data tools + mention that you can also simulate data (in the README)
• [x] I will look at the deidentification tools and see which ones need adding
• [x] I will link to existing overview for the encryptions etc. tools