Software company institutes process to reduce exposure to data containing personal identifiable information

Client background

The client provides leading edge home inspection software and internet tools that inspectors use to deliver comprehensive and easily accessible property information to home and commercial buyers, sellers and real estate professionals.

The business challenge

The client had a new online business unit in the insurance industry that collected property inspections as part of the fraud and risk stratifications process. The data contained sensitive and non-sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) that needed to have safeguards applied before the data could be used in customer behavior research or used by the offshore development partners.

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly worked with the client to institute a process to identify and redact customer data that included PII data such as their name, address, phone number, email, IP/MAC address, social security number, driver’s license number and credit card information in text documents. Additionally, images in the customer data had personal characteristics including faces, face geometry and fingerprints that were identified and redacted. Low confidence redaction decisions automatically triggered a human review. The human data was then used to backwards propagate the automated process.

This approach allowed the client to achieve the following:

• Unlock the value of internal data, providing richer insights and safeguards to reduce exposure to PII data breaches or misuse
• Support new revenue streams by meeting PII privacy regulations and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance requirements to enable monetization of data
• Reduced the effort of manual redaction tasks by over 75% and the duration over manual redaction by a factor of 25x