  The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) grants all natural persons the
right of access to their personal data if this is being processed by data
controllers. The data controllers are obliged to share the data in an
electronic format and often provide the data in a so called Data Download
Package (DDP). These DDPs contain all data collected by public and private
entities during the course of citizens' digital life and form a treasure trove
for social scientists. However, the data can be deeply private. To protect the
privacy of research participants while using their DDPs for scientific
research, we developed de-identification software that is able to handle
typical characteristics of DDPs such as regularly changing file structures,
visual and textual content, different file formats, different file structures
and accounting for usernames. We investigate the performance of the software
and illustrate how the software can be tailored towards specific DDP
structures.
