Feature request: "Anonymise Names" text transformation

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What feature would you like?
I would like to quickly be able to anonymise text in cells. While this is 
outside the original scope of Refine, e.g. cleaning & inputting data into 
Freebase, it would be a valuable transformation for agencies that are 
attempting to release sensitive info.

Here is a naive approach:
 - split the string into n-length characters
 - replace each letter with a randomly chosen letter, retaining the case
 - join characters together as a string

Original issue reported on code.google.com by mcnamara.tim@gmail.com on 1 Nov 2010 at 9:22

[GoogleCodeExporter]

The algorithm you describe is easy to implement, but I don't understand how it 
is better than either a) deleting the text or b) replacing all characters with 
a constant value such as 'x' or '*'.  Note also that leaving the word lengths 
intact represents a leak which may allow some amount of information to be 
recovered.

Original comment by tfmorris on 1 Nov 2010 at 9:37

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Good point. I guess I wanted to create the impression that the text still 
looked like names.

Original comment by mcnamara.tim@gmail.com on 1 Nov 2010 at 9:50

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Do you want the same name appearing in several cells to be anonymized to the 
same random string? And different names to different random strings?

Original comment by dfhu...@gmail.com on 1 Nov 2010 at 10:01

[GoogleCodeExporter]

That's a good idea also David. It would allow sorting to be occur and if 
something relies on a name field, then it's less likely to break. 

Original comment by mcnamara.tim@gmail.com on 1 Nov 2010 at 10:13

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Original comment by tfmorris on 16 Nov 2010 at 6:15

• Added labels: Type-Enhancement
• Removed labels: Type-Defect