Automatic anonymising and desensitising of health and safety data
12/01/2020The Challenge
The Discovering Safety Programme is a large and ambitious scientific endeavour funded by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation and being jointly delivered by the Health and Safety Executive and the University of Manchester through the recently established Thomas Ashton Institute. The programme accumulates large volumes of information on health and safety industrial operating experience, how well risks are controlled across workplaces and the causes of serious accidents through its day to day regulatory activities in Great Britain. However, individual organisations hold a wealth of additional information on how health and safety risks are controlled across their workplaces. The commercial sensitivity of these information sources and the potential risk of breaching data protection regulations are key factors in the willingness of these organisations sharing their health and safety data within their own organisations, industry and the wider safety safety space.
This challenge, set in conjunction with the Discovering Safety Programme, sought innovative, effective, automated techniques for desensitising and anonymising health and safety information which would ultimately enable a much more diverse set of health and safety information to be curated, unlocking much higher value knowledge outputs.
The Finalists
The Winner
Ohalo’s data governance solution was slected as the winner of this challenge. The automated solution allows to meet regulations like GDPR and state data protection laws. Ohalo has two products: the Data X-Ray uses a machine learning algorithm to scan data sources ranging from SQL to Google Drive for sensitive data. The Data Protection Router maintains a record of data lineage across multiple data sources to enable easy simultaneous deletion, access, and rectification of data.
Case Study
Check out the case study and find out how HSE and Ohalo worked together to tackle this challenge.