Wikimedia, Silky MA person donating their DNA sequence anonymously for research purposes may in fact be identified by a few simple web searches, according to a paper published today (January 17) in Science. But rather than trying to protect anonymity, some scientists believe efforts should instead be focused on educating DNA donors and on legislating against the misuse of sequence data.
“The paper is a nice example of how simple it is to re-identify de-identified samples and that the reliance on de-identification as the mechanism of ensuring privacy and avoiding misuse is one that is not viable,” said Nita Farahany, a professor of law and research at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the study.
Participants in public sequencing projects are told that their anonymity is not 100 percent guaranteed, but the risk of a person’s identity being discovered was perceived to be miniscule, explained Yaniv Erlich, a computational geneticist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the study. However, a 2005 Washington Post article about a teenage boy who tracked-down his biological sperm-donor father via ...
