Health privacy again

[Ross Anderson]

List members who follow the debate on the privacy of health records
may be interested in two items. 

The first is a segment this evening at 1930 on the Tonight programme:

   http://www.itv.com/news/tonight/episodes/healthrecordsforsale/default.html

which I understand will star Helen Wilkinson. The second is a paper by
up-and-coming US legal scholar Paul Ohm on the ineffectiveness of
"de-identification" as a means of protecting patient privacy:

   http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006

Now we technies have known for thirty years that de-identification is
much harder than it looks, thanks to Dorothy Denning. You can even 
read all about it in my book. However, up till now the policy folks
have been in deep denial about this. A major paper by a respected 
scholar in the UCLA Law Review, though, will be harder for them to
ignore than the science is.

Ross