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Fundamental privacy rights in a pandemic state

Faced with the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, and to better understand and contain the disease’s spread, health organisations increased the collaboration with other organisations sharing health data with data scientists and researchers. Data analysis assists such organisations in providing info...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Carvalho, Tânia, Faria, Pedro, Antunes, Luís, Moniz, Nuno
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8171945/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34077454
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252169
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author Carvalho, Tânia
Faria, Pedro
Antunes, Luís
Moniz, Nuno
author_facet Carvalho, Tânia
Faria, Pedro
Antunes, Luís
Moniz, Nuno
author_sort Carvalho, Tânia
collection PubMed
description Faced with the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, and to better understand and contain the disease’s spread, health organisations increased the collaboration with other organisations sharing health data with data scientists and researchers. Data analysis assists such organisations in providing information that could help in decision-making processes. For this purpose, both national and regional health authorities provided health data for further processing and analysis. Shared data must comply with existing data protection and privacy regulations. Therefore, a robust de-identification procedure must be used, and a re-identification risk analysis should also be performed. De-identified data embodies state-of-the-art approaches in Data Protection by Design and Default because it requires the protection of direct and indirect identifiers (not just direct). This article highlights the importance of assessing re-identification risk before data disclosure by analysing a data set of individuals infected by Covid-19 that was made available for research purposes. We stress that it is highly important to make this data available for research purposes and that this process should be based on the state of the art methods in Data Protection by Design and by Default. Our main goal is to consider different re-identification risk analysis scenarios since the information on the intruder side is unknown. Our conclusions show that there is a risk of identity disclosure for all of the studied scenarios. For one, in particular, we proceed to an example of a re-identification attack. The outcome of such an attack reveals that it is possible to identify individuals with no much effort.
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spelling pubmed-81719452021-06-14 Fundamental privacy rights in a pandemic state Carvalho, Tânia Faria, Pedro Antunes, Luís Moniz, Nuno PLoS One Research Article Faced with the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, and to better understand and contain the disease’s spread, health organisations increased the collaboration with other organisations sharing health data with data scientists and researchers. Data analysis assists such organisations in providing information that could help in decision-making processes. For this purpose, both national and regional health authorities provided health data for further processing and analysis. Shared data must comply with existing data protection and privacy regulations. Therefore, a robust de-identification procedure must be used, and a re-identification risk analysis should also be performed. De-identified data embodies state-of-the-art approaches in Data Protection by Design and Default because it requires the protection of direct and indirect identifiers (not just direct). This article highlights the importance of assessing re-identification risk before data disclosure by analysing a data set of individuals infected by Covid-19 that was made available for research purposes. We stress that it is highly important to make this data available for research purposes and that this process should be based on the state of the art methods in Data Protection by Design and by Default. Our main goal is to consider different re-identification risk analysis scenarios since the information on the intruder side is unknown. Our conclusions show that there is a risk of identity disclosure for all of the studied scenarios. For one, in particular, we proceed to an example of a re-identification attack. The outcome of such an attack reveals that it is possible to identify individuals with no much effort. Public Library of Science 2021-06-02 /pmc/articles/PMC8171945/ /pubmed/34077454 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252169 Text en © 2021 Carvalho et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Carvalho, Tânia
Faria, Pedro
Antunes, Luís
Moniz, Nuno
Fundamental privacy rights in a pandemic state
title Fundamental privacy rights in a pandemic state
title_full Fundamental privacy rights in a pandemic state
title_fullStr Fundamental privacy rights in a pandemic state
title_full_unstemmed Fundamental privacy rights in a pandemic state
title_short Fundamental privacy rights in a pandemic state
title_sort fundamental privacy rights in a pandemic state
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8171945/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34077454
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252169
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