"The Best Way to Protect Personal Biomedical Data From Hackers Could Be to Treat the Problem Like a Game"
The National COVID Cohort Collaborative, the Personal Genome Project, and other modern biomedical research require large amounts of data specific to individuals. Therefore, such projects face the critical challenge of making detailed datasets publicly available without violating anyone's privacy. Many programs that gather and circulate genomic data try to conceal personal information that could be used to re-identify individuals included in the data. However, residual data can be used to discover personal information from other sources, which could then be correlated with biomedical data to reveal subjects' identities. For example, comparing an individual's DNA data with public genealogy databases such as Ancestry.com can sometimes provide the person's last name. This piece of information can be used in conjunction with demographic data to track down the person's identity through online public record search engines. Researchers at the Vanderbilt Center for Genetic Privacy and Identity in Community Settings have developed methods for assessing and mitigating privacy risks faced in sharing biomedical data. Their methods can be used to protect personal demographics, genome sequences, and other data types from attacks on anonymity. The research group's recent work uses a two-player leader-follower game to model interactions between a data subject and a potentially adversarial data user. In the model, the data subject moves first, deciding what data to share, and then the adversary moves, deciding whether to launch an attack based on the data shared. This work aims at creating a systematic approach to reason about the risks that also account for the shared data's value. The game-based approach provides a more realistic estimate of re-identification risk and helps find data-sharing strategies that balance utility and privacy. This article continues to discuss the importance of protecting personal biomedical data from hackers and the use of game theory to find the best ways to share such data while protecting subjects' anonymity.