Quickstart

Privacy Dynamics is the fastest and most reliable method for engineers and analysts to anonymize data. In this guide, we walk you through the steps of creating your first Project and anonymizing your first Dataset.

Requirements

To complete this guide, you will need:

• A Privacy Dynamics account.
• A dataset in a supported data warehouse or database.
• Credentials for connecting to your data, with appropriate privileges for reading and writing data.

Instructions

Step 1 - Add Data Source

First, you will need to add a Connection to the data source you need anonymized.

• If this is the first time, the Getting Started Wizard will prompt you to set up a connection.
• If you have already created a data source, you can always create a new one by selecting the Connections button from the primary navigation and then selecting ADD CONNECTION.

The exact steps used to set up your connection will depend on the technology. For information on configuring a specific connector, see the Connections section.

Step 2 - Choose Your Data

After your data source has been added, you can use the Choose Data page to configure the datasets you wish to target. To reach this page, select Anonymize from the primary navigation.

1. Use the ORIGIN CONNETION drop down to select the connection you created previously.
2. Configure which data Privacy Dynamics anonymizes by selecting your Origin and Destination connections:
   • ORIGIN - where the untreated data currently lives
   • DESTINATION - where you would like us to write the anonymized data

3. Use the Select Datasets tab and check the dataset treatment plan:
   • Treat - data will run through our anonymizer and written to the Destination.
   • Pass - data will NOT be anonymized but will be included in the selected Destination.
   • If neither option is selected, Privacy Dynamics will not create a table for that dataset in the Destination.
4. Select Next

Step 3 - Configure Treatment

Once you have selected the data for treatment, you can further refine the treatment plan for each Dataset, or select global settings that will apply to the entire project.

1. Selecting 'Treat all identifiers' allows you to decide what Privacy Dynamics should do to PII within the dataset by default:

   • Realistic replaces data with format-preserving, fake values.
   • Mask hides a portion of the field values.
   • Redact removes these values from the treated dataset.

2. Privacy Dynamics automatically detects which fields contain PII. However for additional control, you can configure how you would like the Anonymizer to treat your data. If you want more granular, column level approach, you can select Custom Settings.

   1. Select each dataset to preview the fields detected.
   2. For each column, select your configuration.

3. Select Next.

Step 4 - Create Project

Now you can choose to run with current settings or you use the current configuration to create a Project and run your anonymization treatments on a schedule.

1. Choose...
   • Set Up a Schedule run your treatment plan on a schedule via presets or cron notation (paid plans only).
   • Don't Set Up a Schedule save the dataset configuration, but do not set up an ongoing schedule. You will still be able to run the project on demand.
2. Click Run immediately if you want to run your project once, immediately.
3. Click Automatically create datasets - in order to tell Privacy Dynamics to automatically add any new datasets from the origin connection any time the project is run.
4. Select Finish.

Congratulations, you have just anonymized your first dataset! You can continue to add Connections, Projects, and Datasets to your account.