Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives

Re: Protecting genetic data sets


From: Nick Semenkovich <nick () SEMENKOVICH COM>
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2015 14:18:39 -0500

Most policies in this area are pretty dated.

Anecdotally, a few institutions are treating de-identified (but
comprehensive, e.g. WGS/exome*) human data as equivalent to surname +
gender.

See this well publicized paper from the Whitehead:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6117/321.full
tl;dr: Isolated Y-chromosome SNP data lets you determine a person's last
name w/i some confidence interval.

- Nick


* It's messy to define a good policy here, since data spans a crazy range
from WGS/exome to SNP / single gene / transcriptome / miRNA ...


On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 8:07 PM, Allan Williams <allan.williams () anu edu au>
wrote:

G’day,
        I’m currently looking for standards/procedures for handing human
genomic data.   I’ve seen the guidelines that have been published by the
sanger institute on the sharing of human genomic data (
https://www.sanger.ac.uk/datasharing/assets/wtsi_humgendatasecurity_policy.pdf
) and was wondering if anybody else had something similar that they could
share.  For those who may already be undertaking this type of work at their
institution - is there any standard encryption requirements or standard in
use for sharing datasets?

Thanks,
        Allan
--
Allan Williams
Associate Director (Services and Technologies)
National Computational Infrastructure
The Australian National University
143 Ward Road
Acton ACT 2601 Australia
P: +61-2-6125 8404
E: Allan.Williams () anu edu au
W: www.nci.org.au




-- 
Nick Semenkovich
Laboratory of Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon
Medical Scientist Training Program
School of Medicine
Washington University in St. Louis
https://nick.semenkovich.com/

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