European Citizens have a fundamental right to privacy, it is important for organisations which process personal data to be cognisant of this right. When carried out effectively, anonymisation and pseudonymisation can be used to protect the privacy rights of individual data subjects and allow organisations to balance this right to privacy against their legitimate goals.

Key points

• Irreversibly and effectively anonymised data is not “personal data” and the data protection principles do not have to be complied with in respect of such data. Pseudonymised data remains personal data.
• If the source data is not deleted at the same time that the anonymised data is prepared, the anonymised data will still be considered “personal data”, subject to the Data Protection Acts,