2 ms·
Birthday is super different than year of birth. And zip code is really precise. GP said sex and year of birth that are usually perfectly fine for deidentificat
by prepend 5y ago
Birthday is super different than year of birth. And zip code is really precise.
GP said sex and year of birth that are usually perfectly fine for deidentification assuming some basic k-anonymity and l-diversity protections.
It’s frustrating when people bring up examples of reidentification out of data that were not properly reidentified in the first place.
Hopefully no one competent would think that having unique records based on sex, dob, and zip code are makes data deidentified. This is usually the case of someone not actually deidentified.
The bigger risk, I think, is when you have some threshold of at least 10 records sharing sex, year of birth and still iding individuals.
- jfrunyon 5y agoSure, sex and year of birth alone are fine. Why do you assume they won't be able to use the medical data to further de-anonymize it? "Male, 1993, records are from a hospital in Central Texas so he lives there, who has posted on social media about conditions x, y and z" would probably turn up... me.
- prepend 5y agoThat is exactly my concern. But that’s not what but my comment was about the false statement from Sweeney’s paper talking about zip, dob and no one considers that deidentified.