The usage of patient data for research poses risks concerning the patients’ privacy and informational self-determination. But if biospecimen from patients are anonymized, individual research results cannot be associated back to the individual and cannot be offered to patients in a clinically relevant timeframe. This paper presents a new approach which supports both data privacy and the possibility to give feedback to patients about their individual research results.
Among the arsenal of IT security techniques available, pseudonymization or anonymization is highly recommended by the GDPR regulation. Such techniques reduce risk and assist “data processors” in fulfilling their data compliance regulations. This article provides a useful analysis of the consequence of masking data.
This article provides a brief introduction to the concepts of anonymization and pseudonymization, and how these techniques may be an important aspect to GDPR compliance. It should serve as a cautionary tale of the benefits and limitations of early adoption of de-identification techniques as a central aspect to privacy compliance.
This guide, published by the Personal Data Protection Commission of Singapore, seeks to provide a general introduction to the technical aspects of data anonymization, along with providing information on techniques that could be applied in anonymizing data.
