Street masking: a network-based geographic mask for easily protecting geoprivacy.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Geographic masks are techniques used to protect individual privacy in published maps but are highly under-utilized in research. This leads to continual violations of individual privacy, as sensitive health records are put at risk in unmasked maps. New approaches to geographic masking are required that foster accessibility and ease of use, such that they become more widely adopted. This article describes a new geographic masking method, called street masking, that reduces the burden on users of finding supplemental population data by instead automatically retrieving OpenStreetMap data and using the road network as a basis for masking. We compare it to donut geomasking, both with and without population density taken into account, to evaluate its efficacy against geographic

SUBMITTER: Swanlund D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7336090 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature