jargon

Data engineering·Governance, privacy and meaning

the card number is replaced by a meaningless token, and the only system that can turn it back is one you deliberately cannot query from the warehouse.

Tokenisation

Also calledsurrogate value substitution, vaulted tokens

Replacing a sensitive value with a surrogate that has no mathematical relationship to it, keeping the mapping in a separate vault. Because the token carries no information, the analytical system can join and count on it without ever holding the real value. It is stronger than encryption for this purpose precisely because there is no key in the analytical environment that could reverse it.

Commonly confused with