The Dark Side of Process Mining. How Identifiable Are Users Despite Technologically Anonymized Data? A Case Study from the Health Sector

Over the past decade, process mining has emerged as a new area of research focused on analyzing end-to-end processes through the use of event data and novel techniques for process discovery and conformance testing. While the benefits of process mining are widely recognized scientifically, research has increasingly addressed privacy concerns regarding the use of personal data and sensitive information that requires protection and compliance with data protection regulations. However, the privacy debate is currently answered exclusively by technical safeguards that lead to the anonymization of process data. This research analyzes the real-world utility of these process data anonymization techniques and evaluates their suitability for privacy protection. To this end, we use process mining in a case study to investigate how responsible users and specific user groups can be identified despite the technical anonymization of process mining data.