Privacy-preserving between Individuals with Genomic Similarity

• Manuel Edvar B. Filho Federal University of Ceará (UFC)
• Javam C. Machado Federal University of Ceará (UFC)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbbd_estendido.2021.18176

Abstract

The growth in the production of technologies that aid in gene sequencing has been accompanied by the increase in the production of genomic data about people. By analyzing this data, it is possible to identify personal and family information about individuals, much of it sensitive information. Thus, there is a need to preserve the privacy of individuals when analyzing this type of data. It is common in health institutions to carry out the process of comparing the genomic data of an individual with a set of data from other patients, seeking to find similarities between them in order to carry out similar analyzes and treatments. This work studies the preservation of the privacy of individuals in this process. We investigated perturbing genomic data through differential privacy in order to allow useful analysis and at the same time make it difficult to reidentify the genome holder.

Keywords: Differential Privacy, Genomic Data, Privacy Guarantee

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