State’s Department of Information Technology & Electronics has embarked on a mission to
change the way we deal with data, to ensure greater privacy of data through its
‘Anonymiser Hackathon’ which is going to reach finale in May 2023, writes Souvik Goswami
of APAC News Network.
New Delhi: Enabling Trust in Privacy.
With this motto, West Bengal Government’s Department of Information Technology &
Electronics Department has initiated ‘The Anonymiser Hackathon’ which is bringing startups
& innovators, experts, students, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders together to find
solutions to safeguard transactional data. State officials claim that this is the first of its kind
hackathon in the country on data anonymizer. The hackathon’s final round will take place in
May 2023, and it is being done in two parts- Ideathon & Hackathon.
Question is why we need transactional data? It is needed for various reasons. It can
transform the way we live & work, enable organisations to take informed decisions resulting
in boosting productivity and above all developing new technologies for transformation.
Experts opine that the big data market is slated to grow by $220B to $343 B by 2030
globally. But on the other hand, it has led to increased cyber threat, making large
Personalized Identifiable Information (PII) easily available which is also resulting inharassment and threats to citizens and institutions.
But what is the way out to make data privacy more efficient? For West Bengal Government,
answer lies in enabling trust in privacy. And with that thought, the state’s IT & Electronics
department has focused on ‘Anonymiser Hackathon.’ Now the question is, what is an
anonymizer? An anonymizer can anonymise personally identifiable information from given
sets of data, in a way, that any combination of auxiliary datasets cant deanonymize the
same, where personally identifiable information includes person, entity or even an accident.
In past, annonymiser have been created but there have been problems of accuracy,
limitations of AI based anonymisers and even there are problem with the masking too.
“We have taken this initiative by learning from past and to move forward in right direction.
This is significant because of various reasons. We need multiple data sets to be shared with
entities beyond the owners and come together to derive intelligence. Intelligence extracted
out of such data can transform lives. We also think that without any anonymizer layer, data
protection can be challenged. Therefore, the creation of a truly intelligent anonymizer is the
need of the hour.
This hackathon is not only significant, buy also critical,” says Sanjay Das,
Joint Secretary in the Department of Information Technology & Electronics, Govt of West
Bengal and the main driving force behind the hackathon.
The government has taken this important step for data privacy, we have to wait for
outcome!
