If you feelI totally grasp your desire to capture that strongly,data. So anonymize them. The general idea is you take an MD5 hash of their lowercased email address, and grab as many bits of resolution as you need, and either leave them b7R+
or convert to "AOL passwords" like shave-pen-osram
.
Forbidden
John Smith FAIL
Frank Frink FAIL
Juliana Crain PASS
What you might be allowed
Rufus-Castle-Uniform-Enemy FAIL
Zion-Lathe-Shoot-Loyal FAIL
Flee-Worldly-Variable-Key PASS
What is safer still
Bucket Stop-Bad 4/6 failed (66%)
Bucket Wax-Scissors 5/6 failed (83%)
Bucket Memory-Egg 4/5 failed (80%)
There are two ways to go as far as anonymity, imagining n bits can contain the number of employees (e.g. employees=700 n=10).
- You can go a few extra bits, like n+6 bits, in which case the anonymization would be reversible and the employee could be exposed:
Rufus-Castle-Uniform-Enemy
usually hashes out only to [email protected]... Gotcha! There might be a second email, but the more bits, the less likely. - You can go a few too few bits, like n-3 bits, in which case, the reverse run will reveal
Stop-NukeBad
hashes out to jsmith, emccarthy, jcrian, tkido, ctagawa, and ffrink, making retribution impracticable. This winds up creating a group of "buckets" as it were. - you can salt the MD5, but that fails if the persecutor
- learns the salt via a brute-force crypto attack
- simply commands you to turn it over
- notes the pattern of activities which has been logged, and deduces the user
Your disagreement with their reasons is a classic workplace.se problem, but they may not be telling you all their reasons*. Regardless you must comply in your report to them.
The methods I've provided here with anonymization allow you to present, in your report, the detail data you want to present, while technically complying with their directive. You can either do it in the n+many form, which allows them to backtrack to individual users if they really want to -- or the bucketed form, which does not.
Bucketing is fairly useless at 70% unless you present "In bucket 127, 4/6 users fell for the phish". Bucketing works best when the hit rate is 1/3 the number of buckets or less, so 2 hits in the same bucket are rare. "In 512 buckets, 90 buckets had hits, most likely that's 90-95 people, which is the number you want.
* as a litigator I can think of a really big one. If it were me, I would delete the personalized data "as a matter of routine". Saving everything forever is all fun and games until the subpoena comes.