Advances in artificial intelligence have created new threats to the privacy of people’s health data, a new study shows.
Led by University of California engineer Anil Aswani, the study suggests current laws and regulations are not sufficient to keep an individual’s health status private in the face of AI development.
The findings of the research, which mined two years of data for more than 15,000 Americans, show that by using artificial intelligence, it is possible to identify individuals by learning daily patterns in step data, such as that collected by activity trackers, smartwatches and smartphones, and correlating it to demographic data.
Aswani said: “The results point out a major problem. If you strip all the identifying information, it doesn’t protect you as much as you’d think. Someone else can come back and put it all back together if they have the right kind of information.”
He continued: “You could imagine [an organisation] gathering step data from the app on your smartphone, then buying health care data from another company and matching the two.
“They would have healthcare data that’s matched to names, and they could either start selling advertising based on that or they could sell the data to others.”
He stressed that the problem is not with the smart devices, but with legislation around health data privacy.
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