ArticleTechnology science2017
Re-identification Risks in HIPAA Safe Harbor Data: A study of data from one environmental health study.
Article in Technology science, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed.
- Clifti-GPT: privacy-preserving federated fine-tuning and transferable inference of foundation models on clinical single-cell data.BioData mining · 2026Article
- Reclaiming informed consent to train mental health AI with patient data.NPJ digital medicine · 2026Article
- Ethical Considerations in Patient Privacy and Data Handling for AI in Cardiovascular Imaging and Radiology.Journal of imaging informatics in medicine · 2026Review
- Quantifying the effects of pseudonymisation on epidemiological research reliability: a tailored evaluation using a clinical data warehouse.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2026Article
- Re-identification risk for common privacy preserving patient matching strategies when shared with de-identified demographics.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2026Article
- Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Smart Devices in Metabolic Dysfunction-associated Steatotic Liver Disease.Journal of clinical and translational hepatology · 2026Article
- Hide and Seek: Privacy-Preserving Artificial Intelligence with a Feasibility Study in Rare Disease Diagnosis.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Toward Efficient Health Data Identification and Classification in IoMT-Based Systems.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- FedscGen: privacy-preserving federated batch effect correction of single-cell RNA sequencing data.Genome biology · 2025Article
- Privacy violations in election results.Science advances · 2025Article
- Privacy preserving strategies for electronic health records in the era of large language models.NPJ digital medicine · 2025Article
- Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Gene-Environment Interaction Research.Genetic epidemiology · 2025Review
- Creating High-Quality Synthetic Health Data: Framework for Model Development and Validation.JMIR formative research · 2024Article
- Mimicking clinical trials with synthetic acute myeloid leukemia patients using generative artificial intelligence.NPJ digital medicine · 2024Article
- Evaluating the Utility and Privacy of Synthetic Breast Cancer Clinical Trial Data Sets.JCO clinical cancer informatics · 2023Article
- Implementation of Open Science Practices in Communication Sciences and Disorders Research With Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2023Article
- Managing re-identification risks while providing access to the All of Us research program.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2023Article
- A method for generating synthetic longitudinal health data.BMC medical research methodology · 2023Article
- Sensitive Data Detection with High-Throughput Machine Learning Models in Electrical Health Records.AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium · 2023Article
- Validating a membership disclosure metric for synthetic health data.JAMIA open · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Researchers are increasingly asked to share research data as part of publication and funding processes and to maximize the benefits of publicly funded research. The Safe Harbor provision of the U.S. Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) offers guidance to researchers by prescribing how to redact data for public sharing. For example, the provision requires removing explicit identifiers (such as name, address and other personally identifiable information), reporting dates in years, and reducing some or all digits of a postal (or ZIP) code. Is this sufficient? Can research participants still be re-identified in research data that adhere to the HIPAA Safe Harbor standard? In 2006, researchers collected air and dust samples and interviewed residents of 50 homes from Bolinas and Richmond (Atchison Village and Liberty Village), California, to analyze the residents' exposure to pollutants. The study, known as the Northern California Household Exposure Study [1], led to publications that have been cited hundreds of times. We conducted experiments with separate "attacker" and "scorer" teams to see whether we could identify study participants from two versions of the data redacted beyond the HIPAA standard, one in which all dates were reported in ranges of 10 or 20 years and another in which a study participant's birth year was reported exactly. The attackers were blinded to the names and addresses of the participants, and the scorers were blinded to the strategy.
Identifiers
30687852PMC6344041What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.