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This consultation has closed

What are our plans for the guidance?

The ICO is calling for views on its updated draft guidance on anonymisation, pseudonymisation and privacy enhancing technologies.

We would like to thank everyone who has taken the time to send us comments so far on the published draft chapters.  The feedback we have received has been extremely valuable for informing our work in developing the guidance and we are making substantial changes based on suggestions received so far. The first of these changes is that we now intend to produce two separate guidance products:

  • Anonymisation and pseudonymisation guidance.
  • Privacy-enhancing technologies guidance.

Anonymisation and pseudonymisation guidance

This guidance will be published as a single document, incorporating the following updated chapters:

  • ‘Introduction to Anonymisation’;
  • ‘Identifiability’;
  • ‘Pseudonymisation’; and
  • ‘Accountability and governance’.

It will also include a new chapter on anonymisation and research. Furthermore, we also plan to publish several case studies to demonstrate how various technologies can be used to facilitate compliant data sharing.

The anonymisation and pseudonymisation guidance has been paused for review from 2023 to 2024. The pause will allow the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill to progress through Parliament, so that we can reflect any changes to the law in the final guidance.

Privacy-enhancing technologies guidance

The final PETs guidance is now published

Responding to the call for views

This call for views on all the published chapters listed below remains open until the end of 2022. You can provide your feedback by emailing [email protected].

When submitting your views, please specify to which chapter you are referring.

Privacy statement

For this call for evidence we may publish the responses received from organisations or a summary of the responses but will remove any personal data before publication. We will not publish responses from individuals. For more information about what we do with personal data please see our privacy notice.