Application of Data Masking in Achieving Information Privacy

Abstract

Application of data masking in achieving information privacy is implemented in order to enhance privacy of sensitive data. Data privacy is something that is appreciated by all people in different works of life, not only for self-pride but also for security. Think of a medical institution and his patient: the medical client will appreciate the secrecy of his medical data by the medical personnel; in the case of a bank and his client: the client will appreciate the privacy of his account information; just to mention but few cases. The challenge in data privacy is to share data while protecting personally identifiable information. This research work gives detailed analytical information on application of data masking in achieving information privacy. It covers issues on how data in production environment are being masked to avoid exposure of sensitive of sensitive data to an unauthorized user. The information used for this study was extracted from relevant textbooks, journals and internet. A customer-based application was developed to illustrate this subject. Java (using netbeans as the IDE) and MySQL were used as the programming language and back-end database respectively in the development of the said application.