Application of Differential Privacy Approach in Healthcare Data – A Case Study

With advancement in IoT and its application in various domains, huge amount of data is available and stored in databases both locally and on the cloud. Health care is one such domain. Patient medical data is stored and usually curator of the data is responsible for ensuring privacy of the patient. Privacy becomes the major concern in a scenario, where the data is shared with third party for further analysis or research purposes. To avoid any privacy breach in such or similar scenarios, this article discusses differential privacy approach. Major focus remains exploiting the unique property of differential privacy and its application to healthcare data. We discuss impact of amount of noise introduction in the original data, the relation between the added noise in the data, data utility, and the effect of data leakage to breach of privacy.