To assist in the selection of appropriate solutions, TA6 has published an overview of tools for anonymising tabular data in briefings in Bioinformatics in 2022.

Task Area 6 "Privacy & Data Access in Concert" of NFDI4Health 2022 has compiled a comprehensive review of tools for anonymising tabular data and published it in Briefings in Bioinformatics.

Anonymisation can be an important component of data sharing processes, and it helps protect the privacy of data subjects. This is a challenging task, where it is usually not sufficient to remove directly identifying features such as names. Instead, formal approaches that use mathematical or statistical models are needed to measure and reduce re-identification risks. However, such techniques are complex and should not usually be implemented from scratch. Instead, it is advisable to use existing and robust implementations. However, the range of available open-source tools is very heterogeneous, and it is not easy to get an overview of their strengths and weaknesses.

Based on a comparison of the anonymisation techniques supported by the tools and other aspects, such as the maturity level, among others, recommendations for tools for the anonymisation of medical datasets with different characteristics could be derived.

The results can assist NFDI4Health and other infrastructures in selecting appropriate anonymisation tools.