Anonymizes dates by shifting them by a random offset or rounding to a specified granularity. Shifting preserves relative time differences.
Usage
anonymize_dates(
x,
method = c("shift", "round"),
days_shift = NULL,
granularity = "month",
seed = NULL
)Arguments
- x
A vector of dates (Date, POSIXct, or character that can be coerced to Date)
- method
Character string specifying anonymization method: "shift" (default) shifts all dates by a random offset, "round" rounds dates to specified granularity
- days_shift
For "shift" method: number of days to shift (default: random between -365 and 365)
- granularity
For "round" method: "day", "week", "month", "month_year", "quarter", or "year" (default: "month"). "month_year" returns character strings in "YYYYMM" format (e.g., "202005" for May 2020).
- seed
An optional seed for reproducible anonymization
Examples
dates <- as.Date(c("2020-01-15", "2020-03-20", "2020-06-10"))
anonymize_dates(dates, method = "shift", seed = 123)
#> [1] "2020-03-04" "2020-05-08" "2020-07-29"
anonymize_dates(dates, method = "round", granularity = "month")
#> [1] "2020-01-01" "2020-03-01" "2020-06-01"
anonymize_dates(dates, method = "round", granularity = "month_year")
#> [1] "202001" "202003" "202006"