Anonymizing user, company, and location data using Faker

Anonymizing user, company, and location data using Faker

February 22, 2012 Tagged: anonymizing data faker personal information privacy rand ruby Comments (View) Anonymizing user, company, and location data using Faker Often during development it’s useful to have realistic data to get a sense of how an app would behave in the wild. Seed data is one useful method to get going pre-launch, but production data is always preferable. However production data can contain sensitive user information, which is useful for the dev team but nerve-wracking for those looking to avoid a PR disaster, say if sensitive equipment is left lying around in bars . One solution we’ve used recently to anonymize client data is to obscure the relevant content using the Faker gem and the rand function. User.all.each do |user| genders = ['male', 'female'] user.update_attributes!( :born_on => rand(50*365).days.ago :email => (rand(1000) + 100).to_s + Faker::Inte...

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