Carnegie Mellon scientist says new technologies boost bio-terrorism su...( gnosis and medication codes along with ...)

Under the current ad hoc model of sharing data, widespread potential abuses are possible. For example, medical records for legislators, judges or law enforcement officials could be reproduced and sensitive information used by terrorists, criminals and others to attempt to influence decisions or compromise positions. Using publicly available hospital discharge data, credit card companies and banks could match individuals having terminal illness with those having credit cards or loans and proceed to adjust individual creditworthiness. Computer programs can prevent such abuses by rendering data sufficiently anonymous.

Provable standards of privacy protection are essential, says Sweeney, because ad hoc techniques that attempt to de-identify data often leave it vulnerable to re-identification or so distorted that it is of limited or no use.

Sweeney will also discuss "Selective Revelation," a computational approach to providing data to a surveillance system with a sliding scale of identifiability, where the level of anonymity matches the scientific need based on suspicious occurrences appearing in the data. "In American jurisprudence, human judges make decisions as to whether information will be shared with law-enforcement," she says. "We envision surveillance systems as normally working with sufficiently de-identified data, like that provided by 'Privacert De-identification.'"

"When sufficient scientific evidence merits more identifiable information, the system provides more identifiable data as warranted. Different levels of anonymity are supported and more identifying information is revealed based on evidentiary and scientific standards. This can be thought of as a computational model of the "probable cause predicate" performed in American jurisprudence. Together, Privacert De-identification and Selective Revelation provide
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Contact: Teresa Thomas
thomas@cmu.edu
412-268-2900
Carnegie Mellon University
13-Feb-2004