A community effort to protect genomic data sharing, collaboration and outsourcing.

The human genome can reveal sensitive information and is potentially re-identifiable, which raises privacy and security concerns about sharing such data on wide scales. In 2016, we organized the third Critical Assessment of Data Privacy and Protection competition as a community effort to bring together biomedical informaticists, computer privacy and security researchers, and scholars in ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) to assess the latest advances on privacy-preserving techniques for protecting human genomic data. Teams were asked to develop novel protection methods for emerging genome privacy challenges in three scenarios: Track (1) data sharing through the Beacon service of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health. Track (2) collaborative discovery of similar genomes between two institutions; and Track (3) data outsourcing to public cloud services. The latter two tracks represent continuing themes from our 2015 competition, while the former was new and a response to a recently established vulnerability. The winning strategy for Track 1 mitigated the privacy risk by hiding approximately 11% of the variation in the database while permitting around 160,000 queries, a significant improvement over the baseline. The winning strategies in Tracks 2 and 3 showed significant progress over the previous competition by achieving multiple orders of magnitude performance improvement in terms of computational runtime and memory requirements. The outcomes suggest that applying highly optimized privacy-preserving and secure computation techniques to safeguard genomic data sharing and analysis is useful. However, the results also indicate that further efforts are needed to refine these techniques into practical solutions.

Sharing health-related data: a privacy test?

Greater sharing of potentially sensitive data raises important ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI), which risk hindering and even preventing useful data sharing if not properly addressed. One such important issue is respecting the privacy-related interests of individuals whose data are used in genomic research and clinical care. As part of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH), we examined the ELSI status of health-related data that are typically considered 'sensitive' in international policy and data protection laws. We propose that 'tiered protection' of such data could be implemented in contexts such as that of the GA4GH Beacon Project to facilitate responsible data sharing. To this end, we discuss a Data Sharing Privacy Test developed to distinguish degrees of sensitivity within categories of data recognised as 'sensitive'. Based on this, we propose guidance for determining the level of protection when sharing genomic and health-related data for the Beacon Project and in other international data sharing initiatives.

Risk of re-identification of epigenetic methylation data: a more nuanced response is needed.

In this letter to the editor, we respond to the recent publication by Philibert et al. Methylation array data can simultaneously identify individuals and convey protected health information: an unrecognized ethical concern (Clinical Epigenetics 2014, 6:28). Further discussion of the issues raised by the risk of re-identification of epigenetic methylation data is needed, and a more nuanced approach should be taken with respect to its implications for data sharing policy than the one provided.

Developing and implementing an institute-wide data sharing policy.

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute has a strong reputation for prepublication data sharing as a result of its policy of rapid release of genome sequence data and particularly through its contribution to the Human Genome Project. The practicalities of broad data sharing remain largely uncharted, especially to cover the wide range of data types currently produced by genomic studies and to adequately address ethical issues. This paper describes the processes and challenges involved in implementing a data sharing policy on an institute-wide scale. This includes questions of governance, practical aspects of applying principles to diverse experimental contexts, building enabling systems and infrastructure, incentives and collaborative issues.