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January 18, 2013 06:26 pm GMT

We Must Choose Privacy Or Medical Breakthroughs: Statisticians ID Anonymous Study Participants

flicker-user-alan-cleaverResearchers who leverage public data for life-changing medical breakthroughs have long promised that donors can remain anonymous. The truth is, we're going to have to choose between innovation and privacy, as clever statisticians are discovering ways to identify individuals who never actually reveal their names.This week, the prestigious journal Science published a paper detailing how researchers were able to identify 50 male participants who had anonymously donated their DNA for scientific research to a public database by cross-referencing their genetic information with data from their relatives and other public demographic information.

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