Advances in AI threaten health data privacy: Study

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have created new threats to the privacy of health data, a study has found. The study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, suggests current laws and regulations are nowhere near sufficient to keep an individual's health status private in the face of AI development. The research led by professor Anil Aswani from the University of California -- Berkeley in the US, shows that by using AI, it is possible to identify individuals by learning daily patterns in step data like that collected by activity trackers, smartwatches and smartphones, and correlating it to demographic data. The mining of two years' worth of data covering over 15,000 Americans led to the conclusion that the privacy standards associated with 1996's HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) legislation need to be revisited and reworked. "We wanted to use NHANES (the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) to look at privacy questions because this data is representative of the diverse population in the US," Aswani said.