Personal Privacy

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item Personal Privacy

  • Privacy ...

    there's always something, some personal data, which is in any statistics you want to perform. Even without noting the name and address of the person is always the city, village, age group, etc ... the only way to create privacy is to perform statistics on a wider scale, a huge population area. And yet ...

    JG

  • somewhat skeptical.

    as I understand it, by substituting the 'wrong' disease during the mathematical process phase (why not just subsitute a secret code?) the mathematical process can be done without revealing things. Probably true, but for research to be done, at some point that must be stripped away. Diseases are not abstract, researchers must know the diseases they are dealing with to make any sense of the data.

    Additionally it is essential for other researchers to have access to the raw data to validate the judgements and analysis techniques used. This analysis is not clean. There is always a big risk of confounding factors that the original researcher missed, and without exact knowledge of how conditions were classified, which ones were removed from the dataset and why, it is impossible to spot those confounding factors.

    ...

    -- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --

  • I don't think they're substituting diseases. As I read it, they don't differentiate down when the sample size is small, so you don't get Diabetes I or II for small samples. You just get diabetes.

    It makes some sense to me, that if there are less than some number, say 1000 reponses, you can only drill so far into the data to protect privacy.

    I'm with you on research and getting more data, but not at the expense of privacy. I already know people that have not hired woman because they mentioned wanting to have kids, or someone was concerned they would get pregnant. Can you imagine someone that would implement similar policies because someone was potentially ill? Or carried a gene for a disease?

    We need to be sure that we are respecting individual rights when we consolidate and use data.

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