NIST report covers risks of de-identification
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently released the final draft of its report on de-identification of personal information.
NIST reviewed various de-identification techniques for removal of personal information from computerized documents. De-identification techniques are widely used but existing techniques are insufficient to protect personal privacy because certain remaining information can make it possible to re-identify individuals, according to privacy experts.
“Privacy protection improves as more aggressive de-identification techniques are employed, but less utility remains in the resulting dataset,” according to the report.
This final report follows NIST’s request for comments on its April 7 initial public draft. It offers an overview of the concepts of de-identification, re-identification and data sharing models; approaches for de-identifying structured data; and challenges of de-identification for non-tabular data, such as free-format text, images and genomic information.
The report concludes that although not perfect, de-identification is “a significant technical control that may protect the privacy of data subjects.” Also, there's a need for “standards and assessment techniques that can measurably address the breadth of data and risks” of de-identification.
Read the complete report.
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.