PRODUCTION SCENARIO
A hospital network wants analysts to join patient records across three BigQuery datasets to study readmissions, but policy forbids exposing patient IDs to the analytics team. The joins still have to line up across datasets.
Which privacy technique satisfies both requirements?
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Show answer and explanation
Answer: Pseudonymization, replacing each ID with a consistent token that preserves joins
Pseudonymization swaps a sensitive value for a cryptographically generated token, and because the same input always yields the same token, primary keys still match across tables and teams can join and aggregate without ever seeing the identifier. Deleting or randomizing the IDs would break the joins the study depends on.