Another empirical re-identification attack study evaluated the proportion of Safe Harbor records that can be re-identified and found that only 0.01% can be correctly re-identified with certainty [ 44].
Individuals can be re-identified because of the directly identifying variables and the quasi-identifiers.
Patients can be re-identified in real-time by authorized users' web browsers using temporary identifiers.
Another study evaluated the proportion of records that can be re-identified in a Safe Harbor compliant sample and found that only 0.01% can be correctly re-identified [ 50].
A study in Science Magazine found that anonymized metadata sets used for research were re-identifiable with specific people using just a few data points provided by the people being re-identified.
Princeton's Ed Felten – formerly of the US Federal Trade Commission –said: "A decade of computer science research shows that many data sets can be re-identified.
Privacy advocates also pointed to research showing that people in anonymous databases can sometimes be re-identified.
A recent paper in Nature Scientific Reports showed how the "anonymised" data from a European phone company (likely one in Belgium) could be re-identified with 95% accuracy, given only four points of data about each person (with only two data-points, more than half the users in the set could be re-identified).
Kelsey said Booth was wrong to claim that patients could be re-identified from the records, and challenged him to come up with any examples where this had occurred using hospital data.
Staying tags can be efficiently re-identified by utilizing the retained information.
In the patients undergoing uterosacral plication, following total laparoscopic hysterectomy, the ureters were re-identified.
