Obfuscating Volunteer PII

This process is used when creating temporary validation environments (VAL) from production environments in order to provide usable test datasets whilst preserving the anonymity and privacy of trial participants.

Data never leaves the AWS region where it originally resides.

Clone the environment - a new copy of the database is created in the same AWS region.
The obsfucation script is executed to modify the content of the database.
The clone environment is made available.
Once the customer is finished with the obfuscated VAL environment(s), the database is simply deleted in AWS.
If proof of deletion is required, then a screenshot of the AWS messages indicating successful deletion could be provided upon specific request via service desk.

Obfuscation of the volunteer data is very simple. Real demographic data (name, address, email addresses, phone numbers, next of kin) is removed and replaced with a set of completely fake names and addresses. The year from the DOB is retained so that other data is clinically realistic (e.g. assigning a set of medical history to a random DOB might result in history that makes no clinical sense or that occurs before birth).