Geospatial cryptography: enabling researchers to access private, spatially referenced, human subjects data for cancer control and prevention

Abstract

As the volume, accuracy and precision of digital geographic information have increased, concerns regarding individual privacy and confidentiality have come to the forefront. Not only do these challenge a basic tenet underlying the advancement of science by posing substantial obstacles to the sharing of data to validate research results, but they are obstacles to conducting certain research projects in the first place. Geospatial cryptography involves the specification, design, implementation and application of cryptographic techniques to address privacy, confidentiality and security concerns for geographically referenced data. This article defines geospatial cryptography and demonstrates its application in cancer control and surveillance. Four use cases are considered: (1) national-level de-duplication among state or province-based cancer registries; (2) sharing of confidential data across cancer registries to support case aggregation across administrative geographies; (3) secure data linkage; and (4) cancer cluster investigation and surveillance. A secure multi-party system for geospatial cryptography is developed. Solutions under geospatial cryptography are presented and computation time is calculated. As services provided by cancer registries to the research community, de-duplication, case aggregation across administrative geographies and secure data linkage are often time-consuming and in some instances precluded by confidentiality and security concerns. Geospatial cryptography provides secure solutions that hold significant promise for addressing these concerns and for accelerating the pace of research with human subjects data residing in our nation’s cancer registries. Pursuit of the research directions posed herein conceivably would lead to a geospatially encrypted geographic information system (GEGIS) designed specifically to promote the sharing and spatial analysis of confidential data. Geospatial cryptography holds substantial promise for accelerating the pace of research with spatially referenced human subjects data.

Reconsidering movement and exposure: Towards a more dynamic health geography

“…A significant challenge of using personal location data remains the privacy concerns given the highly identifiable data, for example home address (Jacquez, Essex, et al., 2017; Richardson et al., 2015). These considerations are also particularly relevant here and the subsequent implications for reproducibility and transparency of data.…”

Public health needs GIScience (like now)

“…However, the steep learning curve associated with using many GIS packages has resulted in its slow uptake in many fields (70). As we enter the digital (data) revolution and the age of web mapping (70); it will become critical to develop ways that integrate these methods and data so as to enhance communication efforts (71), sharing of sensitive data (see (72,73)) and analytical capabilities. Examples of these include better integration of geographic analysis with other types of data such as phylogenetic data (74) (75); clustering methods (76) and forecasting in real-time (77) at all stages of public health surveillance, planning and response.…”

Current State of Geospatial Methodologic Approaches in Canadian Population Oncology Research

“…Dawe and colleagues used a similar approach to model non-small cell lung cancer incidence by census subdivision (14). Given recent efforts in Indigenous cancer control, increased accuracy of digital geographic information (56), and the increasing trend of geospatial methods applied to Canadian population oncology research, there is a need to examine issues related to privacy, interpretation and information governance. Furthermore, given relatively small population sizes of Indigenous peoples in Canada ( 57), there is a need to explore opportunities for supporting Indigenous-led efforts using geospatial methods.…”