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Yeah, useful selectors for researchers, and still no identity. We learnt that somewhere there is a man/woman that is depressed and has weight management issue.
by rvnx 5y ago
Yeah, useful selectors for researchers, and still no identity.
We learnt that somewhere there is a man/woman that is depressed and has weight management issue.
We can take policy actions in order to improve the situation and monitor how this affects life of people (e.g. how much antidepressants are used in a year, are the food policies effective, what conditions are often linked to sudden cardiac arrest, etc).
And "Rebecca", nobody knows it's her, except herself, and those to whom she decide to publicly disclose her conditions (e.g. on social networks or to specialists).
- ceejayoz 5y agoNo, you’re missing the point. Asking people in the study if it’s OK to release their data means the resulting data set is skewed. People with certain conditions and other variables will be more or less likely to agree, leaving a non-representative sample of the actual study. It will no longer be random.
- throwawaygh 5y agoExactly. Actually, set aside consent entirely. The problem is NOT "how do we de-anonymize". That is super easy. The problem is "how do we de-anonymize IN A WAY THAT LEAVES RESULTS OF RELEVANT STATISTICAL TESTS INVARIANT". Much harder. Remove a bunch of probably non-random points and make any logisitic regression on that dataset return the same result within some delta. There are trivial impossibility theorems. Really, really trivial. "Left as freshman exercise and if you can't some up with an example maybe step back and stop talking about this topic" trivial. Now, add back consent. "how do we delete a subset of data that is likely not uniformly distributed with respect to risk variables and also de-anonymize the remaining subset of data.... AGAIN, IN A WAY THAT LEAVES RESULTS OF RELEVANT STATISTICAL TESTS INVARIANT". The position is untenable.