Customer Story
Municipality Midden-Drenthe
Efficiency gains in working with sensitive data
With the introduction of Privinity, the municipality of Midden-Drenthe has achieved gains in efficiency and security within its existing anonymization process.
Mark van der Straten
Technical Consultant
Municipality Midden-Drenthe
“Especially for smaller municipalities like Midden-Drenthe – where few people have to do a lot of work – it is essential to work with data as efficiently as possible. The way Privinity supports us in this aspect is immensely helpful.”
The Municipality of Midden-Drenthe is a municipality with nearly 34,000 inhabitants, resulting from the merger of the municipalities of Beilen, Smilde, and Westerbork. The municipality is in the midst of a service renewal process in which the effective and efficient use of data plays a crucial role. With this strategy, the municipality is increasingly publishing and sharing data. In this context, it is essential to ensure the optimal protection of data privacy for the residents of Midden-Drenthe.
To achieve this, the municipality has chosen to process and store privacy-sensitive data as anonymized as possible. However, they faced several challenges. The original anonymization setup had limitations, causing some of the anonymized data to be less usable. Moreover, anonymization was largely a manual process, making it challenging to manage and automate.
With the introduction of Privinity, the Municipality of Midden-Drenthe has achieved efficiency gains within the existing anonymization process. Anonymization is now fully automated through standardized anonymization configurations, ensuring the optimal protection of anonymized data. This has also led to a reduction in processing time, making data available more quickly for research, analysis, and publication purposes.
In parallel with the automated anonymization of datasets, the municipality has started exploring broader integration of Privinity solutions. This includes automated document masking for compliance with the Dutch Government Information Act and the Freedom of Information Act. These areas also benefit significantly from the efficiency gains of automated anonymization and masking.
Beyond the efficiency and data security benefits, there is a larger advantage to this approach: “It is essential to handle privacy-sensitive data securely in accordance with laws and regulations. Additionally, as a municipality, we see a significant opportunity to increase trust among residents towards the municipality. We consider this crucial, especially as we publish and share more data,” according to Mark van der Straten.
