Dissemin is shutting down on January 1st, 2025

Published in

PAGEpress, Geospatial Health, 2017

DOI: 10.4081/gh.2017.573

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Balancing geo-privacy and spatial patterns in epidemiological studies

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

To balance the protection of geo-privacy and the accuracy of spatial patterns, we developed a geo-spatial tool (GeoMasker) intended to mask the residential locations of patients or cases in a geographic information system (GIS). To elucidate the effects of geo-masking parameters, we applied 2010 dengue epidemic data from Taiwan testing the tool’s performance in an empirical situation. The similarity of pre- and post-spatial patterns was measured by D statistics under a 95% confidence interval. In the empirical study, different magnitudes of anonymisation (estimated Kanonymity ≥10 and 100) were achieved and different degrees of agreement on the pre- and post-patterns were evaluated. The application is beneficial for public health workers and researchers when processing data with individuals’ spatial information.