Related papers: Textwash -- automated open-source text anonymisati…
For sensitive text data to be shared among NLP researchers and practitioners, shared documents need to comply with data protection and privacy laws. There is hence a growing interest in automated approaches for text anonymization. However,…
The collection and use of personal data are becoming more common in today's data-driven culture. While there are many advantages to this, including better decision-making and service delivery, it also poses significant ethical issues around…
Text anonymization is the process of removing or obfuscating information from textual data to protect the privacy of individuals. This process inherently involves a complex trade-off between privacy protection and information preservation,…
Data containing personal information is increasingly used to train, fine-tune, or query Large Language Models (LLMs). Text is typically scrubbed of identifying information prior to use, often with tools such as Microsoft's Presidio or…
Text sanitization is the task of redacting a document to mask all occurrences of (direct or indirect) personal identifiers, with the goal of concealing the identity of the individual(s) referred in it. In this paper, we consider a two-step…
Deidentification seeks to anonymize textual data prior to distribution. Automatic deidentification primarily uses supervised named entity recognition from human-labeled data points. We propose an unsupervised deidentification method that…
We present a novel benchmark and associated evaluation metrics for assessing the performance of text anonymization methods. Text anonymization, defined as the task of editing a text document to prevent the disclosure of personal…
In this work, we address the problem of text anonymization where the goal is to prevent adversaries from correctly inferring private attributes of the author, while keeping the text utility, i.e., meaning and semantics. We propose…
Anonymization is a foundational principle of data privacy regulation, yet its practical application remains riddled with ambiguity and inconsistency. This paper introduces the concept of anonymity-washing -- the misrepresentation of the…
The proliferation of textual data containing sensitive personal information across various domains requires robust anonymization techniques to protect privacy and comply with regulations, while preserving data usability for diverse and…
In the field of social networking services, finding similar users based on profile data is common practice. Smartphones harbor sensor and personal context data that can be used for user profiling. Yet, one vast source of personal data, that…
Text sanitization aims to rewrite parts of a document to prevent disclosure of personal information. The central challenge of text sanitization is to strike a balance between privacy protection (avoiding the leakage of personal information)…
Whistleblowing is essential for ensuring transparency and accountability in both public and private sectors. However, (potential) whistleblowers often fear or face retaliation, even when reporting anonymously. The specific content of their…
Sanitizing sensitive text data typically involves removing personally identifiable information (PII) or generating synthetic data under the assumption that these methods adequately protect privacy; however, their effectiveness is often only…
The extensive use of online social media has highlighted the importance of privacy in the digital space. As more scientists analyse the data created in these platforms, privacy concerns have extended to data usage within the academia.…
Recent privacy research on large language models (LLMs) has shown that they achieve near-human-level performance at inferring personal data from online texts. With ever-increasing model capabilities, existing text anonymization methods are…
Twitter data have become essential to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and social science research, driving various scientific discoveries in recent years. However, the textual data alone are often not enough to conduct studies: especially…
We use commercially available text analysis technology to process interview text data from a computational social science study. We find that topical clustering and terminological enrichment provide for convenient exploration and…
In the context of information systems, text sanitization techniques are used to identify and remove sensitive data to comply with security and regulatory requirements. Even though many methods for privacy preservation have been proposed,…
Automated clinical text anonymization has the potential to unlock the widespread sharing of textual health data for secondary usage while assuring patient privacy and safety. Despite the proposal of many complex and theoretically successful…