Snapshot release 22-Jul-21 (hashing, batch processing & more)

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A new snapshot release with bug fixes and improvements is available for Windows and Mac. You can find out more and download the release at:

https://www.easydatatransform.com/easydatatransform_v1j2.html

The snapshot is made available for customers to give feedback on. It has not been tested as heavily as a production release, but it should be fairly stable. Please reply to this thread if you have any feedback.

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Hi, I’m not familiar with Hashing.
What is it and when would I use it?

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A hash maps any string to another string of a fixed length.

E.g.:

The MD5 hash of “Dan” is:

97c8e6d0d14f4e242c3c37af68cc376c

The MD5 hash of “dan” is:

9180b4da3f0c7e80975fad685f7f134e

So similar input produce very different outputs.

Hashing is a one-way process. You can’t reverse it.

The chance of 2 different strings producing the same hash ( a ‘collision’) is infinitessimally small.

Hashing has various applications:

  • verifying authenticity
  • anonymizing data
  • finding duplicates of large chunks of data (compare the hashes)
  • password storage (using a salted hash)

There is a good Tom Scott video on Youtube that I will link in the next newsletter.

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As @Admin states, hashes are widely used in a variety of areas. By and large, their use is non-controversial, but when they are used for ‘pseudo-anonymisation’ of personal data their use is far more complex. This is the process used if an organisation provides personal data to some third party. It was adopted because it can give ‘identity’ without being ‘identifying’ . So if anonymized data was sent to a third party from, say, your doctor, the third party could recognise that two keys in separate records of 97c8e6d0d14f4e242c3c37af68cc376c were the same person, (‘Dan’) but not (allegedly) who you actually are.
However, that’s actually not really true … in the unlikely event you were ever interested i this, see https://mosaiceffect.com/

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Yes. Even if nominally indentifying information (such your social security number) is anonymized it maybe possible to identify you using other non-anonymized information, e.g. a combination of your age, ethnicity and postcode might be uniquely identifying.

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It looks like the Windows binaries linked are not the latest snapshot, Apologies. We will try to fix that soon.