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Re-identification of genomic data using long range familial searches

Yaniv Erlich, Tal Shor, Shai Carmi, Itsik Pe’er
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/350231
Yaniv Erlich
MyHeritage, Or Yehuda 6037606, Israel.Department of Computer Science, Fu Foundation School of Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (C2B2), Department of Systems Biology, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.New York Genome Center, New York, NY 10013, USA.
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  • For correspondence: erlichya@gmail.com
Tal Shor
MyHeritage, Or Yehuda 6037606, Israel.
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Shai Carmi
Braun School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
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Itsik Pe’er
Department of Computer Science, Fu Foundation School of Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (C2B2), Department of Systems Biology, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
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Abstract

Consumer genomics databases reached the scale of millions of individuals. Recently, law enforcement investigators have started to exploit some of these databases to find distant familial relatives, which can lead to a complete re-identification. Here, we leveraged genomic data of 600,000 individuals tested with consumer genomics to investigate the power of such long-range familial searches. We project that half of the searches with European-descent individuals will result with a third cousin or closer match and will provide a search space small enough to permit re-identification using common demographic identifiers. Moreover, in the near future, virtually any European-descent US person could be implicated by this technique. We propose a potential mitigation strategy based on cryptographic signature that can resolve the issue and discuss policy implications to human subject research.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted June 19, 2018.
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Re-identification of genomic data using long range familial searches
Yaniv Erlich, Tal Shor, Shai Carmi, Itsik Pe’er
bioRxiv 350231; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/350231
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Re-identification of genomic data using long range familial searches
Yaniv Erlich, Tal Shor, Shai Carmi, Itsik Pe’er
bioRxiv 350231; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/350231

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