General cases

The techniques in this section show the most general ways to use NOW Privacy to solve problems.

Don’t aim for perfection first time

Like cooking in the real world, you’re unlikely to get everything right first time. You’ll probably need to iterate, to examine the results of your queries, assess how accurate they are and how useful they are. Then you can use the information in those results, or that’s missing from them, to refine the queries you are making on your data.

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Look at all the recipes

Where possible, we try to link the general cases to specific use cases that we’ve helped clients with. We want to save you as much work as possible.

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Use workflows

To measure progress over time, it’s a good idea to use workflows. Workflows give you visibility of how many items match your criteria.

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Use tagging

Another, more general, technique that’s useful is tagging. For example, imagine you’re searching for credit card numbers. You find some results and check the files, and you discover that some of them are, in fact, clean. They have 16-digit numbers that look like credit card number, but they’re not actual credit card numbers. If you tag them as “safe”, you can then exclude them from future searches.