Towards a Toolbox for Privacy-Preserving Computation on Health Data

Abstract

Substantial advances in methods of collecting and aggregating large amounts of biomedical data have been met with insufficient measures of protecting it from unwarranted access and use. Most of the current layers of protection are merely aimed at ensuring compliance with regulations (e.g., the EU's General Data Protection Regulation) but do not represent a vision of privacy-by-design as an efficient and ethical advantage in biomedical research and clinical applications. This not only slows down the pace of such efforts but also leaves the data exposed to a wide spectrum of cyberattacks. This work presents an overview of recent advancements in data and compuation security, along with a discussion of their limitations and potential for deployement in both health care and research settings.