Version 1.0.1 (2025-11-22)
CRAN release: 2025-11-23
Bug Fixes
- Critical fix: Replaced weak hash function in UUID generation with cryptographic hash (MD5) to prevent duplicate UUIDs for different patients in large datasets
- Added robust hash function for datasets with more than 5 unique values
- Maintains backward compatibility: small datasets (≤5 unique values) use original hash method
- Now handles datasets with 1 million+ records without collisions
- Added
digestpackage as required dependency for robust hashing - Maintains referential integrity (same input → same UUID) while ensuring uniqueness
Technical Details
- For large datasets (>5 unique values): Uses MD5 hash via
digestpackage - For small datasets (≤5 unique values): Uses original hash method (backward compatible)
- MD5 collision probability for 1M records: ~10^-15 (negligible)
- All functions using UUIDs (anonymize_id, anonymize_names, anonymize_locations) benefit from this fix
Version 0.1.0 (Initial Release)
Features
- Initial release of privacyR package
-
anonymize_id()function for anonymizing patient identifiers -
anonymize_names()function for anonymizing patient names -
anonymize_dates()function with shift and round methods -
anonymize_locations()function with remove and generalize methods -
anonymize_dataframe()function for anonymizing entire data frames - Comprehensive test suite using testthat
- Vignette with detailed examples and best practices
- Full roxygen2 documentation