[MLUG] unidirectional key?

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

I'm working on a study where we have a key that relates subject IDs (and
with them all subject data records) to subject names.  It's a simple idea.
The data file is anonymized by using numbers instead of names, and we have
another file that relates the numbers to the names.  Now we're being told
that we may have to destroy the key to protect the anonymity of subjects.

Destroying the key would stop anyone from identifying a subject by his ID
number, which is the desired effect, but it would also mean that if a
subject were to give us some new data after the key had been destroyed, we
wouldn't be able to add that data to the database, and this is a bad
thing.

So, here's the question -- Is there any way to create a unidirectional key
such that we can add data to the database, but we can't learn a subject's
name from the database?

Mike
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