Cameron Abbott, Keely O’Dowd, and Giles Whittaker of K&L Gates write:
As discussed in a recent blog post on CyberWatch Australia, researchers from the University of Melbourne successfully re-identified the medical data of Australian patients that formed part of a de-identified open dataset. This raises a myriad of questions about privacy, the need for access to big data, and how organisations can protect the information with which they are entrusted.
DE-IDENTIFYING DATA DOES NOT GUARANTEE ANONYMITY
In August 2016, the Federal Department of Health published online the de-identified longitudinal medical billing records of 10% of Australians, about 2.9 million people. For each selected patient, all publicly-reimbursed medical and pharmaceutical bills for the years 1984 to 2014 were included.
Read more on National Law Review.