Re-identification risk for common privacy preserving patient matching strategies when shared with de-identified demographics.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

Privacy preserving record linkage (PPRL) refers to techniques used to identify which records refer to the same person across disparate datasets while safeguarding their identities. PPRL is increasingly relied upon to facilitate biomedical research. A common strategy encodes personally identifying information for comparison without disclosing underlying identifiers. As the scale of research datasets expands, it becomes crucial to reassess the privacy risks associated with these encodings. This paper highlights the potential re-identification risks of some of these encodings, demonstrating an attack that exploits encoding repetition across patients.

Materials and methods

The attack leverages repeated PPRL encoding values combined with common demographics shared durin

SUBMITTER: Eliazar A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12844594 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature