Private Genome Data Dissemination

Abstract

With the rapid advances in genome sequencing technology, the collection and analysis of genome data have been made easier than ever before. In this course, sharing genome data plays a key role in enabling and facilitating significant medical breakthroughs. However, substantial privacy concerns have been raised on genome data dissemination. Such concerns are further exacerbated by several recently discovered privacy attacks. In this chapter, we review some of these privacy attacks on genome data and the current practices for privacy protection. We discuss the existing work on privacy protection strategies for genome data. We also introduce a very recent effort to disseminating genome data while satisfying differential privacy, a rigorous privacy model that is widely adopted for privacy protection. The proposed algorithm splits raw genome sequences into blocks, subdivides the blocks in a top-down fashion, and finally adds noise to counts in order to preserve privacy. It has been empirically shown that it can retain essential data utility to support different genome data analysis tasks.