GDPR compliance
CDQ supports customers in maintaining GDPR compliance by identifying business partner records that may contain personal data. This is crucial for the data sharing approach, since shared insights must remain privacy-compliant. Only non-personal, business-related data can be exchanged among participants.
Our algorithms analyze patterns such as national registration numbers, legal forms that indicate sole proprietorships, and typical name structures to estimate the probability that a record refers to a natural person. A neural network trained on large sets of company and forename data enhances this detection logic. By ensuring that personal data is excluded from shared datasets, CDQ guarantees that collaboration remains secure, ethical, and fully compliant with European data protection laws.
Approach to identify personal information
The algorithm to identify personal data distinguishes between
- contact information provided in a business partner's name such as "CDQ AG attn: Simon Schlosser"
- Registered individuals, i.e. natural persons that are registered as e.g. sole proprietors in an official register (e.g. Simon Schlosser e.K.)
- Individuals, i.e. natural persons where there is no evidence that the person is actually registered (e.g. freelancers as "Simon Schlosser")
| Example | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| CDQ AG | Legal Entity | Typical example. There is no name information (person name) included and there is a legal form available. |
| CDQ AG z.Hd. Simon Schlosser | Legal Entity with contact information | |
| Simon Schlosser | Individual | Typical example. There is a person name, no legal form and no VAT ID. The record is not to be stored in the CDL database. |
| Simon Schlosser e.K. | Registered individual | Individuals that are registered and have a legal form. There are different legal forms for natural persons in different countries. |
Identification strategies
In order to identify personal information, different strategies are applied to a given record. The following strategies are available and are executed in the following order:
Name list check
CDQ manages lists of typical forenames for different countries and trains a neuronal network with this data to identify such terms in a given record. Feedback from the Data Sharing Community is also used as training input to improve matching results.
Legal form check
If legal form information is provided in a given record, our services try to identify and enrich the related legal form. Some legal forms in some countries indicate registered individuals or sole proprietors and thus provide evidence on personal information in terms of natural person names.
No legal forms maintained.
Identifier check
Derivation
Based on certain identifiers, it is possible to identify natural persons. For example in PT (Portugal), the first digit of the VAT number indicates whether the record represents an individual: 1-3 are regular people, 5 are companies.
| Identifier schema | Country | Identifier | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 000000000057H0CS5Z46ACS04Y | Identifies a Portuguese tax identification number that belongs to a natural person rather than to a company. The leading digit gives the type of taxpayer, with 1 to 3 standing for individuals, 5 for companies and the leading pair 45 for non-resident individuals. | ||
| 00000000007CGYKN2FKHXN1JB9 | Identifies a Russian taxpayer identification number that belongs to a company rather than to a natural person, since a company carries ten digits whereas a natural person carries twelve. | ||
| 0000000000BGWDBG0HD1V5FAWY | Describes how to recognise a sole proprietor behind a Czech tax identification number (DIC), which for a natural person is derived from their birth number and therefore encodes the date of birth. In the ten-digit case the first two digits are the year of birth in the range 00 to the current year or 54 to 99, the third and fourth digits are the month of birth given as 1 to 12 or 21 to 32 for men and 51 to 62 or 71 to 82 for women, and the fifth and sixth digits are the day of birth from 01 to 31. In the nine-digit case the year of birth lies between 00 and 53, the month is 1 to 12 for men and 51 to 62 for women, and the fifth and sixth digits are again the day of birth from 01 to 31. | ||
| 0000000000DCRZ8Y1PB8PCXV09 | Identifies a Permanent Account Number that belongs to a natural person rather than to a company. In the ten-character number of five letters, four digits and a check letter, the fourth character shows the type of holder, and the letter P stands for an individual acting as proprietor. | ||
| 0000000000Q4F2WYGAGTRQMW7P | Identifies a Pakistani National Tax Number that belongs to a natural person rather than to a company or an association of persons. Individuals carry the thirteen-character form of five characters, seven characters and a final digit, whereas entities have the shorter number. | ||
| 0000000000V72GY0NA3SG7YVPP | Describes how to recognise a sole proprietor behind a Czech European VAT identification number. The VAT identifier is identical to the Czech tax identification number, so the same rules apply and the digits following the country prefix encode the date of birth of the natural person. |
Personal identification numbers
Moreover, there are identifiers that are only assigned to natural persons such as the US_SEC_ID (US - Social security number) in the US (United States of America).
| Personal Identification Number | Country | Name |
|---|---|---|
| BR_CPF (BR - Natural Persons Register) | BR (Brazil) | Cadastro de Pessoas Físicas (pt) Natural Persons Register (en) |
| ES_NIE (ES - Tax Identification Number) | ES (Spain) | Numero de Identificacion de Extranjero (es) Tax Identification Number (en) |
| FO_FIN (FO - Faroese ID Num.) | FO (Faroe Islands) | Faroese Identification Number (en) |
| FO_FPN (FO - Faroese P Number) | FO (Faroe Islands) | Faroese P Number (en) |
| GL_CPR (GL - CPR number) | GL (Greenland) | CPR number (en) |
| JE_SSN (JE - Social Security Number) | JE (Jersey) | Social Security Number (en) |
| KE_PIN (KE - Personal ID) | KE (Kenya) | Personal Identification Number (en) |
| KR_RES_ID (KR - Resident ID) | KR (South Korea) | Resident Registration Number (en) |
| SM_SSI (SM - Social Security Number) | SM (San Marino) | Social Security Number (en) |
| UK_IN_ID (UK - NI number) | GB (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) | NI number (en) |
| US_SEC_ID (US - Social security number) | US (United States of America) | Social security number (en) |
Contact information parsing
In order to identify contact information, typical keywords such as attn:, z.Hd., attention to etc. are searched. This parsing is provided via the data quality rule Contact information misplaced.