Opensource & Machine Learning for GDPR Data Discovery

GDPR (EU General Data Protection Regulation) is around the corner and bigger companies are getting ready to adopt it as they already know what kind of penalties come from non-compliance. It replaces replaces the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC and was designed to harmonize data privacy laws across Europe and it is the biggest change on data privacy regulation in 20 years for Europe. While GDPR main elements can be a little tricky to understand, one thing is clear as sensitive Data Discovery is mandatory, so you can find the Personal and sensitive information on your data repositories, that can be almost everything from databases to files. Basically, we focus our data discovery on three main areas: column discovery, data discovery and file discovery. Column discovery is easy to understand, based on specific keywords or sentences we find column names on databases and match it with possible sensitive data.