GDPR Anonymization for High-Volume Imagery Data in Electric Mobility

The Client

The company is a Chinese trailblazer and a prominent player in the cutting-edge electric mobility market. They strive to foster a community centered around advanced electric vehicles, promoting shared experiences and mutual growth with users. Their core activities encompass the conceptualization, development, collaborative manufacturing, and distribution of high-end smart electric vehicles, driving advancements in futuristic fields like autonomous driving, digital solutions, electric powertrains, and batteries.

The Request

The client approached us with the request to collect certain imagery data using its special collection vehicles and for the purpose of developing and testing its ADAS and AD solutions for its production vehicles in Europe and throughout the world.

The request involved challenging technical scope due to the sophisticated device setup and wide range of collection environments. The cameras were mounted on different positions of the car to capture visual inputs from different angles, and included faces in reflection or faces behind the windshield which also had the be anonymized by GDPR scope.

The additional challenge was the timeline requirement from the client as they needed a large volume of data processed and anonymized by the GDPR in a short timeframe.

The Solution

NavInfo as a data processor developed a general-purpose toolchain with a focus on privacy by design to ensure that any data we share follows Data Privacy and regulatory compliance (i.e. GDPR).

Considering the large volume of the data, we optimized the model processing speed to make the anonymization process more efficient (processing a large volume of data in an agreed-upon timeframe) and more cost-efficient for the client. Additionally, we worked with the client throughout the whole process to define the pipeline and optimize it on AWS for the large volume of data with the lowest ecological footprint.

Our anonymization model also performs well to process real drive data collected under different weather and lighting condition, across multiple countries and regions, successfully meeting all specific requirements detailed by the clients. Thanks to all activities we undertook, we were able to minimize the impact on the downstream activities.

We documented the data processing process according to GDPR requirements and secured data transfers to and from the client. We performed quality control and monitoring of the whole process.