Advances in artificial intelligence threaten privacy of people's health data

Advances in artificial intelligence have created new threats to the privacy of people's health data, a new University of California, Berkeley, study shows. Led by UC Berkeley engineer Anil Aswani, the study 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 was published Dec. 21 in the JAMA Network Open journal. The findings show that by using artificial intelligence, it is possible to identify individuals by learning daily patterns in step data, such as that collected by activity trackers, smartwatches and smartphones, and correlating it to demographic data. The mining of two years' worth of data covering more than 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.