Warning

This package is a work in progress and is not yet available on pypi. This documentation should be considered more of a design document for what scrubadub will do someday rather than a specification of what it can do today.

scrubadub

Remove personally identifiable information from free text. Sometimes we have additional metadata about the people we wish to anonymize. Other times we don’t. This package makes it easy to seamlessly scrub personal information from free text, without comprimising the privacy of the people we are trying to protect.

scrubadub currently supports removing:

• names
• email addresses

Quick start

Getting started with scrubadub is as easy as pip install scrubadub and incorporating it into your python scripts like this:

>>> import scrubadub

# John may be a cat, but he doesn't want other people to know it.
>>> text = "John is a cat"

# Replace names with {{NAME}} placeholder. This is the scrubadub default
# because it maximally omits any information about people.
>>> placeholder_text = scrubadub.clean_with_placeholders(text)
>>> placeholder_text
"{{NAME}} is a cat"

Related work

scrubadub isn’t the first package to attempt to remove personally identifiable information from free text. There are a handful of other projects out there that have very similar aims and which provide some inspiration for how scrubadub should work.

• MITRE gives the ability to replace names with a placeholder like [NAME] or alternatively replace names with fake names. last release in 8/2014. not on github. unclear what language although it looks like python. it is clear that the documentation sucks and is primarily intended for academic audiences (docs are in papers).
• physionet has a few deidentification packages that look pretty decent but are both written in perl and require advance knowledge of what you are trying to replace. Intended for HIPAA regulations. In particular, deid has some good lists of names that might be useful in spite of the fact it has 5k+ lines of gross perl.

Contents:

• Contributing
  • Quick start
• Change Log
  • latest changes in development for next release
  • 0.1.0

Indices and tables

• Index
• Module Index
• Search Page