Confidentiality

Question 1

Confidentiality

Answer 1

what we can’t find out
Balance public’s right to health information with individual’s right to privacy
Why is this an issue
Ethics
Standards
Regulations (HIPAA)
Compliance: people won’t give data without assurances of confidentiality

Question 2

3 dangers

Answer 2

3 dangers
Direct release of individual information
Indirect release of individual information
Small numbers
Small geographic areas
E.g. teen births in small town
Cross stratification makes even smaller numbers
Group disclosures - cross stratification

Question 3

Protections

Answer 3

No access (no location info at all): internal access only certain computers
Restrict access - registration, purchase
Aggregation: no small numbers, no small areas, no small areas with small numbers
Rounding to mask
Geographic masking

Question 4

Geographic Masking

Answer 4

Geographically we’d like point locations for cases - on a confidentiality scale this is suboptimal
SOLUTION: “Jitter” the locations - add known amount of noise for each location
If move all by the same distance/direction shift = good as same relative positions is bad find one, find them all
Random shift (jitter) = hard to crack but lurs some relationships
Tell analysts so they know they have a true relative pattern or a particular amount of randomness - can adjust analysis to incorporate this uncertainty

Question 5

HIPPA

Answer 5

1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
Limits access to protected health information
Addresses individual in personal identifiers
Public health information includes addresses/location data if it contains less than 20,000 people → often prohibits geographic information below county level
Evolving situation, but not simple/