Protected Data Domain (PDD):

A Privitar Protected Data Domain (PDD) is a logical collection of de-identified datasets, usually brought together for a specific purpose or use-case. The PDD also contains associated summary information, traceability (via watermarking), lifecycle management and strict linkage isolation from datasets in other PDDs.

A PDD records metadata about the associated data release, including permitted recipients, approvers of the release, intended purpose and lifetime of the data, and what privacy protections have been applied. Data in PDDs can be watermarked, enabling traceability back to the PDD and its associated metadata in the event of a data breach. PDDs are therefore a powerful tool to achieve data provenance and track processing of data for governance and audit reasons.

PDDs also provide strong control over linkability of data. Each dataset associated with a PDD may, if desired, maintain referential integrity with other datasets associated with the same PDD, which often is beneficial for analysis purposes and utility reasons. However, Privitar prevents direct linkage of datasets between different PDDs by always using different tokenization in each dataset. This reduces the risk of linkage attacks and enforces the principle of data minimization. PDDs enable data owners to monitor and manage safe data. For example, they provide the ability to identify when data access should be removed after agreed expiry deadlines for a project, or to enforce how long it should be possible to unmask data.

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