Data masking obscures sensitive data displayed on screens, such as masking certain characters (e.g., showing *** for parts of SSNs). It allows legitimate use while protecting the data from being misused or stolen. Encryption is unrelated because it protects data in transit or at rest but does not address how it is displayed. Tokenization replaces data with a token but is more relevant for storage and transactional systems, not screen data. Scrubbing refers to cleansing datasets but does not address this scenario.