Scalable Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing Methodology for Genome-Wide Association Studies

The protection of privacy of individual-level information in genome-wide association study (GWAS) databases has been a major concern of researchers following the publication of "an attack" on GWAS data by Homer et al. (2008) Traditional statistical methods for confidentiality and privacy protection of statistical databases do not scale well to deal with GWAS data, especially in terms of guarantees regarding protection from linkage to external information. The more recent concept of differential privacy, introduced by the cryptographic community, is an approach that provides a rigorous definition of privacy with meaningful privacy guarantees in the presence of arbitrary external information, although the guarantees may come at a serious price in terms of data utility. Building on such notions, Uhler et al. (2013) proposed new methods to release aggregate GWAS data without compromising an individual's privacy. We extend the methods developed in Uhler et al. (2013) for releasing differentially-private $\chi^2$-statistics by allowing for arbitrary number of cases and controls, and for releasing differentially-private allelic test statistics. We also provide a new interpretation by assuming the controls' data are known, which is a realistic assumption because some GWAS use publicly available data as controls. We assess the performance of the proposed methods through a risk-utility analysis on a real data set consisting of DNA samples collected by the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium and compare the methods with the differentially-private release mechanism proposed by Johnson and Shmatikov (2013).Comment: 28 pages, 2 figures, source code available upon reques

Privacy and Modification of Terrace Housing among Malay Occupants in Klang Valley, Malaysia

Privacy at home is important for normal functioning of daily activity. However, in the context of housing in Malaysia, there are many opinions which suggest that existing terrace housing is incongruent with the privacy needs of its inhabitants. Inconsistency between the house as a site for privacy, and the occupants results in behavioural adaptation and redefining of privacy needs, which over time, changed the concept of privacy. Due to its importance, privacy is expected to be one of the main reasons for housing modification which has become a Malaysian culture. This research is focused on examining the concept of privacy in the context of housing among Malay families living in terrace housing, and the relationship between privacy and terrace housing design and modification. The research employed a combination of survey interview and case study which uses in-depth interview, analytical review of housing layout drawings and site observation. The research involved 374 respondents for the survey interview and 11 respondents for the case study from three housing schemes in Gombak and Kajang. SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science Software) was used to analyse data from survey interview. Data from case study were interpreted and transcribed to provide consistent results which complement each of the analyses. The research found that the concept of privacy in the context of terrace housing among Malay families has changed. Privacy of the family is given importance as compared to community ties and individual privacy. The changes are partly attributed to terrace house and housing environment which do not support the privacy needs of Malay family. It was found that at the private level, privacy is most affected by some aspects of terrace housing design particularly the lack of a clear division between the public and private spaces. At the public level, privacy is affected by the overall arrangement of housing units and the external factors of housing environment. Privacy is found to influence housing modification base on the specifics of design attributes modified. However, financial resources of the family, availability of space, individual family’s privacy perceptions and expectations and housing environment influenced the level of privacy achieved after housing modification

Categories, Gender and Online Community

This article explores issues of authenticity, identity, privacy, power, community, and gender as they occur in online spaces. Using the Cybermind mailing list as a case study, Marchall highlights how gender is used as a category in online spaces, and what effect this has had on the community, including in offline, 'in the flesh' meetings. He also demonstrates that offline markers of identity cannot help but be significant in the online world

Exploring Privacy-traces of Users from Online Community: A Case Study of Diabetes Topic Discussions

Online health communities (OHCs) have already become essential medium for people to obtain medical knowledge, share experiences and emotions. OHC users are able to post user-generated content (UGC) to interact with each other. However, the large amount of UGC may lead to personal information even privacy disclosed online. Although such disclosure may help users to trade some social support, which is the basis of sustaining a successful OHC, the users should be aware of the risks of leaving such traces online. This study selects a popular online Q & A community “Zhihu” in China as the research target. By collecting all questions and corresponding answers from 4 diabetes sub-communities, we would like to identify online privacy-traces of users from UGC. According to the theory of Communication Privacy Management, we build an explanatory model to understand user behaviors of concealing or revealing private information from the aspects of user characteristics, peer attention, and social support effects

Intentionally Public, Intentionally Private: Gender Non-Binary Youth on Tumblr and the Queering of Community Literacy Research

In this essay, I uncover the ways in which the non-binary gender community challenges what we know about privacy and reciprocity within community engaged work. Using my experience as a program coordinator for an LGBTQ youth center, I illustrate the myriad of privacy needs of non-binary gender teens and young adults who expect to be simultaneously both public and private in their online writing on Tumblr. I argue that for the nonbinary gender community on Tumblr, direct contact from the researcher not only may invade their intimate space but also cause physical or emotional harm as many non-binary Tumblr users are underage and participating on Tumblr in secret. Instead, I demonstrate how the study of non-binary gender literacy practices can be done without engaging with or quoting directly from publicly published content, instead favoring an emergent thematic methodology. Additionally, I make a case for a queer methodology which instead seeks to recruit participants in the real world and be invited into their digital community once trust and reciprocity is established should interviews be important for further study

Finding the SurPriSe: A Case Study of a Faculty Learning Community

This article details a faculty learning community (FLC) that started in 2009 on the campus of a Midwestern University and has evolved into an interdisciplinary research, teaching and social community of practice and learning called SurPriSe. SurPriSe is an acronym that reflects the interest area of the FLC; Sur for surveillance, Pri for privacy, and Se for security. This case study provides understanding of the social context, the institution and the nature of encouraging established faculty to engage in new research and pedagogical interests that are interdisciplinary

A relook at visual privacy: definition and factors influencing Muslim visual privacy (MVP)

Past literature has indicated a lack of visual privacy in the design of terrace housing in Malaysia, especially for Malay Muslim families, owing to specific Islamic regulations and principles governing the modesty of self, family, and house. The main objectives of this paper are to analyse the definition of visual privacy from Islamic perspective or Muslim visual privacy (MVP), and to determine the factors that influence its perception among Malay Muslim communities who are living in terrace housing development in the Klang Valley, Malaysia. The study involved a survey interview of 441 respondents and 10 case studies. Findings indicate that in adapting to the contemporary urban environment of today’s terraced housing, Malay Muslim families are shifting away from the traditional Malay as well as previous Islamic concept of visual privacy. Analysis indicated that the Malay Muslim families required a balance between visual exposure and visual access in order to achieve an optimum level of visual privacy to enhance daily comforts, while still being informed by Malay culture and Islam. It is the balance between visual exposure and visual access which influences the four identified factors influencing Muslim visual privacy which are protection of aurat, security, community interaction and hospitality to gues