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ALL-DATA0012 · ungoverned_sensitive_field

Count fields the catalog marks sensitive while leaving their governance incomplete.

This is a deterministic rule for all languages. Read its implementation.

Read the tags the catalog attaches to every field, keep the fields carrying one of sensitive_tags, and report each of them whose asset names no owner or whose own glossary terms are empty. A tag says the column holds personal or restricted data, a glossary term says which written policy governs it, and an owner says who answers when somebody asks to export it. A tag standing alone is a label nobody can act on, which is the state an access review finds the week after the data left.

Tag matching folds case and trims whitespace, since a catalog populated by several teams spells the same label as PII, pii, and a padded variant of both, and treating those as three different labels would silently exempt two of them.

Each finding names the asset, the field, the tag that made it sensitive, and which of ownership and glossary context it lacks. The value is the number of sensitive fields with an incomplete governance record.

A field carrying no tag at all is never reported, because this rule judges what the catalog declares sensitive rather than guessing sensitivity from a column name. A sensitive field whose asset names an owner and whose glossary terms are stated is complete and stays quiet. A field tagged with something outside sensitive_tags is left alone, so a project models its own vocabulary by stating it rather than by arguing with this list. Whether the named policy is the correct one is a judgment nobody makes from metadata alone, so presence is all this measures.

An email field tagged pii on an asset with no owner and no glossary term returns 1. The same field on an owned asset carrying one glossary term returns 0, and so does an untagged field on that same unowned asset.

  • Cites “DAMA-DMBOK”, data security and privacy management
  • Cites “DataHub documentation”, tags and glossary term metadata