Re: [MLUG] unidirectional key?

[Dave Lloyd <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Mike Miller wrote:

> 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

How about a md5 hash of the name?  I thought those were unidirectional.

--dlloyd
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