As AI tools and techniques become more powerful, privacy advocates and research scientists are raising the alarm over the possibility that anonymized healthcare data can be reassembled to the point where specific individuals can be identified.
A recent study conducted by engineers at the University of California Berkeley concluded that current US regulations governing the protection of user data has been made obsolete by advanced in AI capabilities.
Here is an excerpt from a report published in Verdict:
The researchers mined the health data of over 15,000 US residents covering two years. They found that by using AI, it was possible to identify specific individuals. This was achieved by identifying the daily patterns of step data, which is collected by a host of devices including wrist-worn fitness trackers and smartwatches and conventional smartphones, and correlating it to key demographic data.
“We wanted to use NHANES (the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) to look at privacy questions because this data is representative of the diverse population in the US,” explained UC Berkeley engineer Anil Aswani, who led the study.
“The results point out a major problem. If you strip all the identifying information, it doesn’t protect you as much as you’d think. Someone else can come back and put it all back together if they have the right kind of information.”
