# What is the best practice to pseudonymize user data?
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-best-practice-to-pseudonymize-user-data/252573
**Category:** Elastic Security
**Created:** [October 19, 2020, 3:21pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-best-practice-to-pseudonymize-user-data/252573 "2020-10-19T15:21:58Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@elk51211](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/elk51211)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2020, 3:21pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-best-practice-to-pseudonymize-user-data/252573/1 "2020-10-19T15:21:58Z")
What is the recommended approach to deal with logs to be as GDPR compliant as possible?
I need to pseudonymize user data. The only resource I found is dated back to march of 2018 in this blog post: [https://www.elastic.co/de/blog/gdpr-personal-data-pseudonymization-part-1](https://www.elastic.co/de/blog/gdpr-personal-data-pseudonymization-part-1)
Is this still best practice? Can I use the fingerprint method within a beat instead of logstash, because I'm not using logstash right now and try to keep my stack as slim as possible.
Really looking forward to your answer and thanks a lot,
Nils
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### Author:  [@Frank\_Hassanabad](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Frank_Hassanabad)
#### Post date: [November 3, 2020, 12:17am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-best-practice-to-pseudonymize-user-data/252573/2 "2020-11-03T00:17:16Z")
Hi @elk51211, I was curious and looked briefly into this but this isn't my area of expertise. It looks like there might have been some work in beats for a processor for this:
> **[Generate a fingerprint of an event | Filebeat Reference \[7.9\] | Elastic](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/current/fingerprint.html)**
Outside of that I think there are discussions about accomplishing it on a technical level within ingest nodes but I don't think that is possible at the moment from some reading towards the bottom here:
>
>
> A potentially useful processor is one that can generate one or more "fingerprints" from an incoming document. This could aid in...
As for if this is the recommended approach to use a beats processor or logstash, that I cannot say for sure, someone else here might know more though.
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### Author:  [@elk51211](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/elk51211)
#### Post date: [November 23, 2020, 8:47am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-best-practice-to-pseudonymize-user-data/252573/3 "2020-11-23T08:47:05Z")
Thanks for your opinion!
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### Author:  [@elk51211](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/elk51211)
#### Post date: [November 23, 2020, 3:09pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-best-practice-to-pseudonymize-user-data/252573/4 "2020-11-23T15:09:24Z")
I looked up the fingerprint beat solution. Unfortunately it does not offer an UUID Method. I need unique pseudo ids. Any idea?
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### Author:  [@Frank\_Hassanabad](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Frank_Hassanabad)
#### Post date: [November 23, 2020, 4:02pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-best-practice-to-pseudonymize-user-data/252573/5 "2020-11-23T16:02:12Z")
I would open a github issue within the file beats repo as a feature request if it's missing something you need and they might be able to help you out:
> **[elastic/beats](https://github.com/elastic/beats/tree/master/filebeat)**
>
> :tropical\_fish: Beats - Lightweight shippers for Elasticsearch & Logstash - elastic/beats
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### Author:  [@willemdh](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/willemdh)
#### Post date: [November 26, 2020, 9:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-best-practice-to-pseudonymize-user-data/252573/6 "2020-11-26T21:15:22Z")
@elk51211 Imho this is a good question. Also I've been waiting for a long time for part 2.. 🙂
> **[Protecting GDPR Personal Data with Pseudonymization](https://www.elastic.co/de/blog/gdpr-personal-data-pseudonymization-part-1)**
>
> GDPR lists pseudonymization as a technical measure that can be used to protect personal data. We explore an approach for implementing it in the Elastic Stack.
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [November 4, 2022, 8:15am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-best-practice-to-pseudonymize-user-data/252573/7 "2022-11-04T08:15:44Z")