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Glite Dictionary
🧑‍🤝‍🧑 To make impersonal 🗃️ To anonymize
to depersonalize

to depersonalize

7.0
Remove names and other personal details from records so people cannot be identified
  • verb
  • /ˌdiːˈpɜːrsənəlaɪz/
  • Specialized
translation icon : despersonalizar
  • When analyzing the data, it is crucial to depersonalize personal information to avoid breaches of privacy.

Examples

  • Depersonalized and desacralized, the body became data.

    Academic text (1996)

  • For any notion of the social good, which is not merely an appeal to fantastic organicism, must be constructed by aggregating, combining, ranking, or otherwise depersonalizing the separate and variegated goods of particular individuals.

    Academic text (1990)

  • To protect user privacy, companies must depersonalize their data before sharing it.

  • The researchers decided to depersonalize the survey responses to ensure anonymity.

Synonyms

to anonymize
vsto depersonalize
  • Specialized
1 6.3

Remove or hide personal details so a person cannot be recognized

is focused on data and records within computing and research contexts
to disidentify
vsto depersonalize
  • Specialized
9.5

Remove personal details from data so a person cannot be easily found

is focused mainly on removing formal personal identifiers in datasets
to impersonalize
vsto depersonalize
7.3

To make communication feel less personal by removing names or feelings

is about removing personal identifiers from data rather than changing tone or relations

Antonyms

to identify
∞ 1.8

Say who someone is or what something is

How Identifiable

to mask
  • Specialized
10 6.3
to disidentify
  • Specialized
9.5
to depersonalize
  • Specialized
7.0
to anonymize
  • Specialized
1 6.3

Surface Forms

depersonalize infinitive
depersonalized past
depersonalized past participle
depersonalizing present participle
depersonalizes third person singular

Morphology

depersonalize = personalize (semi-transparent) = de + personal + ize

The form is clear, but the technical sense of removing identifiers from data is a specialized extension rather than an everyday inference.

Etymology

Depersonalize has the parts de- 'remove' and person 'a person', and in data work it means to remove names and ID from records so people cannot be identified. So to depersonalize data is to 'take the person out' of the record to protect privacy.