Fundamental privacy rights in a pandemic state

PLoS One. 2021 Jun 2;16(6):e0252169. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0252169. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Faced with the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, and to better understand and contain the disease's spread, health organisations increased the collaboration with other organisations sharing health data with data scientists and researchers. Data analysis assists such organisations in providing information that could help in decision-making processes. For this purpose, both national and regional health authorities provided health data for further processing and analysis. Shared data must comply with existing data protection and privacy regulations. Therefore, a robust de-identification procedure must be used, and a re-identification risk analysis should also be performed. De-identified data embodies state-of-the-art approaches in Data Protection by Design and Default because it requires the protection of direct and indirect identifiers (not just direct). This article highlights the importance of assessing re-identification risk before data disclosure by analysing a data set of individuals infected by Covid-19 that was made available for research purposes. We stress that it is highly important to make this data available for research purposes and that this process should be based on the state of the art methods in Data Protection by Design and by Default. Our main goal is to consider different re-identification risk analysis scenarios since the information on the intruder side is unknown. Our conclusions show that there is a risk of identity disclosure for all of the studied scenarios. For one, in particular, we proceed to an example of a re-identification attack. The outcome of such an attack reveals that it is possible to identify individuals with no much effort.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • COVID-19 / transmission*
  • Civil Rights
  • Computer Security
  • Confidentiality / ethics*
  • Confidentiality / trends
  • Disclosure
  • Humans
  • Pandemics / ethics*
  • Privacy
  • SARS-CoV-2 / metabolism
  • SARS-CoV-2 / pathogenicity

Grants and funding

The work of TC and LA is supported by Project POCI-01-0247-FEDER-041435 (Safe Cities) and financed by the COMPETE 2020, under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, and through the European Development Fund (EDF). The work of LA is also supported by EU H2020-SU-ICT-03-2018 Project No. 830929 CyberSec4Europe (cybersec4europe.eu). The work of NM is financed by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within project UID/EEA/50014/2019. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.