It Seems Data Anonymisation Is Really Hard To Get Right While Making Available Any Data That Is Useful.

This appeared last week:Has somebody shared your 'anonymised' health data? Bad newsHarvard boffins unmask 100% of 'encrypted' S Korean recordsBy Alexander J Martin 2 Oct 2015 at 08:34 Researchers from Harvard University have published a paper claiming a 100 per cent success rate in de-anonymising patients from their supposedly anonymised healthcare data in South Korea.The study, which bears the ronseal title of "De-anonymizing South Korean Resident Registration Numbers Shared in Prescription Data", was published this week in Technology Science.Two de-anonymisation experiments were conducted in the study on prescription data from deceased South Koreans, with encrypted national identifiers - Resident Registration Numbers (RNN) - included.The researchers found significant vulnerabilities in the anonymisation process which is applied to identifiers contained within prescription data, data which is often sold to multinational health companies.The RNNs, similar to... This is the initial part of the post - read more by clicking on the title of the article. David.
Source: Australian Health Information Technology - Category: Information Technology Authors: Source Type: blogs