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Definitions

With privacy engineering, many new and unknown definitions arise. This page aims at summarizing these definitions. This list is by no means complete, but it will be kept up to date.

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List of definitions

GDPR
The General Data Protection Regulation defines an official set of definitions, which you can find on the official GDPR page. It aims at protecting an individual's privacy and ensuring that individuals have various rights regarding their data and data collection where they are the data subject

Data Pipeline
A data collection configuration, existing of either streams or batch jobs, that allow for data collection and processing. This basically takes care of the ETL/ELT process.

Stream
An input or output continuous collection of data.

Input Stream / Source Stream / Encrypted Stream
All of the above mean the same. This is the stream to which data is sent (the input), and from which data that is encrypted can be read.

Derived Stream A stream that is based on the encrypted stream, however, with data modifications applied. These data modifications can entail encryption and masking, among others.

Field masking The process of hashing the contents of a data field, to make it unreadable, without using encryption. The goal here is to prevent the reverse process, i.e. finding the raw unhashed value.

Schema
Structure of the data that is sent to STRM Privacy. Also named serialization schema See data contracts for details.

Data Contract
A contract that specifies which fields are sensitive (and possibly Personally Identifiable Information (PII)), which validations should be applied to events, etc. See data contracts for details.

Purpose The goal or purpose for which certain data is collected, and (legally) allowed to be used. E.g. functional or marketing.

Data Subject
A data subject is the individual that the personal data applies to. A data subject is the owner of the data that is collected on this individual.

Data Subject Consent
The set of purposes for which the data subject (your customer) has given consent to use sensitive data (typically PII). This is used both in the events, and in the configuration of a decrypted stream.

Data Subject
A data subject is the individual that the personal data applies to. A data subject is the owner of the data that is collected on this individual.

Encryption
Data that is scrambled and cannot be read without the encryption key.

Batch Exporter
STRM Privacy component that writes batches of events to a Data Connector.

Data Connector
STRM Privacy component that allows you to connect to blob storage, for both reading and writing purposes.

Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
Information that can be used to identify a person, directly (e.g. social security number, name) or indirectly (e.g. IP address), or belongs to an identifiable person (e.g. gender, interests).

Quasi Identifier (QI) Information that on itself cannot be used to identify a person (e.g. zipcode), but in combination with other information (e.g. zipcode and house number) can be used to identify a single person.

Serialization Format
This defines the way that an event is converted to and from bytes, so that they can be transported and/or stored.