Related papers: Identifying Participants in the Personal Genome Pr…
DNA sequencing is becoming increasingly commonplace, both in medical and direct-to-consumer settings. To promote discovery, collected genomic data is often de-identified and shared, either in public repositories, such as OpenSNP, or with…
Data sharing is crucial for open science and reproducible research, but the legal sharing of clinical data requires the removal of protected health information from electronic health records. This process, known as de-identification, is…
With the aim of informing sound policy about data sharing and privacy, we describe successful re-identification of patients in an Australian de-identified open health dataset. As in prior studies of similar datasets, a few mundane facts…
Sharing genome data in a privacy-preserving way stands as a major bottleneck in front of the scientific progress promised by the big data era in genomics. A community-driven protocol named genomic data-sharing beacon protocol has been…
The increasing availability of publicly shared electrocardiogram (ECG) data raises critical privacy concerns, as its biometric properties make individuals vulnerable to linkage attacks. Unlike prior studies that assume idealized adversarial…
This study deals with a fairly simply formulated problem -- how to estimate the number of people bearing the same full name in a large population. Estimation of name popularity can leverage personal name matching in databases and be of…
Gender information is no longer a mandatory input when registering for an account at many leading Internet companies. However, prediction of demographic information such as gender and age remains an important task, especially in…
Suppose you find the same username on different online services, what is the probability that these usernames refer to the same physical person? This work addresses what appears to be a fairly simple question, which has many implications…
How well do demographics explain party identification? Demographics are related to party identification in political polls, news articles, and academic publications. Yet, there is a diversity of party identification even within demographic…
Computational social scientists often harness the Web as a "societal observatory" where data about human social behavior is collected. This data enables novel investigations of psychological, anthropological and sociological research…
The genome is a unique identifier for human individuals. The genome also contains highly sensitive information, creating a high potential for misuse of genomic data (for example, genetic discrimination). In this paper, I investigated how…
We show that individual, confidential microdata records from the 2010 U.S. Census of Population and Housing can be accurately reconstructed from the published tabular summaries. Ninety-seven million person records (every resident in 70% of…
Nationality identification unlocks important demographic information, with many applications in biomedical and sociological research. Existing name-based nationality classifiers use name substrings as features and are trained on small,…
The ability to share social network data at the level of individual connections is beneficial to science: not only for reproducing results, but also for researchers who may wish to use it for purposes not foreseen by the data releaser.…
Documents revealing sensitive information about individuals must typically be de-identified. This de-identification is often done by masking all mentions of personally identifiable information (PII), thereby making it more difficult to…
User identification has been a major field of research in privacy and security topics. Users might utilize multiple Online Social Networks (OSNs) to access a variety of text, videos, and links, and connect to their friends. Identifying user…
Genome sequencing technology has advanced at a rapid pace and it is now possible to generate highly-detailed genotypes inexpensively. The collection and analysis of such data has the potential to support various applications, including…
Recent analysis by researchers at the U.S. Census Bureau claims that by reconstructing the tabular data released from the 2010 Census, it is possible to reconstruct the original data and, using an accurate external data file with identity,…
All over the world, future parents are facing the task of finding a suitable given name for their child. This choice is influenced by different factors, such as the social context, language, cultural background and especially personal…
Not all people are equally easy to identify: color statistics might be enough for some cases while others might require careful reasoning about high- and low-level details. However, prevailing person re-identification(re-ID) methods use…