On 14 Apr 2017, at 7:47 , Maurice Vergeer <m.vergeer@maw.ru.nl> wrote:
Still, anonymizing is fairly easy when you have the data in a statistical program such as SPSS, R or even Excel: replace the userhandles with a unique number (from 1 to N). Then remove the userhandles from the dataset. Still I would advice always to keep a secure file with both keyvariables userhandles and the new identifyer for future resrearch.
I you hash the userhandle, e.g. with SHA-1 or similar (which is even possible in Excel with a small formula), there is no need to keep a correspondence file, because hashing a string will always yield the same hash - while making reversal virtually impossible (i.e. you cannot get the handle from the hash). best, Bernhard -- Bernhard Rieder | Associate Professor | New Media and Digital Culture University of Amsterdam | Turfdraagsterpad 9 | 1012 XT Amsterdam | The Netherlands http://thepoliticsofsystems.net | http://rieder.polsys.net | https://www.digitalmethods.net | @RiederB