New command – generating unique IDs

[bbdaniels]

Something I whipped up to solve a help request – it is a simple command that generates unique IDs based on any nested combination of unique variables (ie state-district-village) etc. Could be useful here?

https://github.com/bbdaniels/makeid

[kbjarkefur]

I definitely thinks this could be useful here.

My only concern is that ppl will use this and then think their ID is safe from privacy perspective just because they used the command we developed and published.

What should this test for? For example, if there is only one person samples in the village and the village code is some official village code everyone knows, then that ID is identifying if the village know who the enumerators spoke to.

While perhaps nitty-gritty, those are the things I would like to think about before publishing any makeid command since it relates to data security,

[bbdaniels]

I think it should be reasonably ok for that specific concern – as written it doesn't copy the values from the underlying variables (they can even be strings). But it does assign numbering in a predictable way (alphabetically), so perhaps it's better to randomize the order?

[kbjarkefur]

Make sense, I think we should still do our homework and do some thinking before we publish anything. The unknonw-uknowns...

But I still think this is a good fit for iefieldkit.