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Latanya Sweeney

Publications and source records attributed to Latanya Sweeney.

2 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2005

A secure protocol to distribute unlinkable health data.

Health data that appears anonymous, such as DNA records, can be re-identified to named patients via location visit patterns, or trails. This is a realistic privacy concern which continues to exist because data holders do not collaborate prior to making disclosures. In this paper, we present STRANON, a novel computational protocol that enables data holders to work together to determine records that can be disclosed and satisfy a formal privacy protection model. STRANON incorporates a secure encrypted environment, so no data holder reveals information until the trails of disclosed records are provably unlinkable. We evaluate STRANON on real-world datasets with known susceptibilities and demonstrate data holders can release significant quantities of data with zero trail re-identifiability.

Algorithms↗
PubMed2004

How (not) to protect genomic data privacy in a distributed network: using trail re-identification to evaluate and design anonymity protection systems.

The increasing integration of patient-specific genomic data into clinical practice and research raises serious privacy concerns. Various systems have been proposed that protect privacy by removing or encrypting explicitly identifying information, such as name or social security number, into pseudonyms. Though these systems claim to protect identity from being disclosed, they lack formal proofs. In this paper, we study the erosion of privacy when genomic data, either pseudonymous or data believed to be anonymous, are released into a distributed healthcare environment. Several algorithms are introduced, collectively called RE-Identification of Data In Trails (REIDIT), which link genomic data to named individuals in publicly available records by leveraging unique features in patient-location visit patterns. Algorithmic proofs of re-identification are developed and we demonstrate, with experiments on real-world data, that susceptibility to re-identification is neither trivial nor the result of bizarre isolated occurrences. We propose that such techniques can be applied as system tests of privacy protection capabilities.

Algorithms↗