bluntmachetti/synthworld

SynthWorld is a tool for generating fake but realistic populations of people, complete with family, friend, and coworker connections, for the purpose of testing privacy and identity software. The project explains its role with a simple comparison, a general fake-data generator creates individual rows of information, while SynthWorld creates connected worlds of people along with a hidden answer key describing exactly which facts are true. The generated identities are deliberately made confusing in realistic ways, including people who share common names, use different spellings of the same name, or have nicknames, so that systems being tested have to work through genuine ambiguity rather than clean, easy data. Because everything is generated from a starting seed number, the same command always produces the exact same population, which makes results repeatable and comparable over time. The tool is aimed at teams building or evaluating software that extracts personal information from documents, matches records to the same person, infers relationships between people, or scores how exposed someone's personal data is. It ships as a command line tool that can generate a population of people, generate related test scenarios, and grade a system's output against the hidden answer key using a separate evaluate command. A public, already-generated set of benchmark data is also available to browse online without installing anything. SynthWorld grew out of a companion project called Idcognito but is designed to work as its own independent piece of software. It explicitly does not turn real, sensitive data into anonymized data, it only creates fictional data from scratch. It is written in Python, distributed as a package called idcognito-synthworld, and released under the Apache-2.0 license, which allows free use, modification, and redistribution, including for commercial purposes.