The Role of Privacy Guarantees in Voluntary Donation of Private Health Data for Altruistic Goals

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Wang, Ruizhe, De Viti, Roberta, Dubey, Aarushi, Redmiles, Elissa M.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Wang, Ruizhe
De Viti, Roberta
Dubey, Aarushi
Redmiles, Elissa M.
author_facet Wang, Ruizhe
De Viti, Roberta
Dubey, Aarushi
Redmiles, Elissa M.
contents The voluntary donation of private health information for altruistic purposes, such as supporting research advancements, is a common practice. However, concerns about data misuse and leakage may deter people from donating their information. Privacy Enhancement Technologies (PETs) aim to alleviate these concerns and in turn allow for safe and private data sharing. This study conducts a vignette survey (N=494) with participants recruited from Prolific to examine the willingness of US-based people to donate medical data for developing new treatments under four general guarantees offered across PETs: data expiration, anonymization, purpose restriction, and access control. The study explores two mechanisms for verifying these guarantees: self-auditing and expert auditing, and controls for the impact of confounds including demographics and two types of data collectors: for-profit and non-profit institutions. Our findings reveal that respondents hold such high expectations of privacy from non-profit entities a priori that explicitly outlining privacy protections has little impact on their overall perceptions. In contrast, offering privacy guarantees elevates respondents' expectations of privacy for for-profit entities, bringing them nearly in line with those for non-profit organizations. Further, while the technical community has suggested audits as a mechanism to increase trust in PET guarantees, we observe limited effect from transparency about such audits. We emphasize the risks associated with these findings and underscore the critical need for future interdisciplinary research efforts to bridge the gap between the technical community's and end-users' perceptions regarding the effectiveness of auditing PETs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_03451
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Role of Privacy Guarantees in Voluntary Donation of Private Health Data for Altruistic Goals
Wang, Ruizhe
De Viti, Roberta
Dubey, Aarushi
Redmiles, Elissa M.
Cryptography and Security
Human-Computer Interaction
The voluntary donation of private health information for altruistic purposes, such as supporting research advancements, is a common practice. However, concerns about data misuse and leakage may deter people from donating their information. Privacy Enhancement Technologies (PETs) aim to alleviate these concerns and in turn allow for safe and private data sharing. This study conducts a vignette survey (N=494) with participants recruited from Prolific to examine the willingness of US-based people to donate medical data for developing new treatments under four general guarantees offered across PETs: data expiration, anonymization, purpose restriction, and access control. The study explores two mechanisms for verifying these guarantees: self-auditing and expert auditing, and controls for the impact of confounds including demographics and two types of data collectors: for-profit and non-profit institutions. Our findings reveal that respondents hold such high expectations of privacy from non-profit entities a priori that explicitly outlining privacy protections has little impact on their overall perceptions. In contrast, offering privacy guarantees elevates respondents' expectations of privacy for for-profit entities, bringing them nearly in line with those for non-profit organizations. Further, while the technical community has suggested audits as a mechanism to increase trust in PET guarantees, we observe limited effect from transparency about such audits. We emphasize the risks associated with these findings and underscore the critical need for future interdisciplinary research efforts to bridge the gap between the technical community's and end-users' perceptions regarding the effectiveness of auditing PETs.
title The Role of Privacy Guarantees in Voluntary Donation of Private Health Data for Altruistic Goals
topic Cryptography and Security
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03451