Information based biomedical discovery, in particular the push toward precision medicine, depends on open-ended analysis of de-identified data from patients and research participants on the largest possible scale. Sharing data while controlling the risk of data reidentification under privacy attack is vital to the enterprise.
Game theory indicates that only minimal edits are required to protect DNA data against attacks on anonymity, a health information privacy research team reported Dec. 10 in Science Advances.
Zhiyu Wan, PhD, Bradley Malin, PhD, and colleagues at Vanderbilt University Medical Center have in previous papers blazed a trail for the application of game theory to genomic and health data reidentification risk. Here, they demonstrate a game theoretic method for protecting de-identified genomic data against attacks in which an adversary gathers information from different public sources to triangulate a target’s identity.