Dealing with Privacy Issues in Data Integration: Scenarios for Official Statistics

摘要

The increase of data availability poses new challenges and suggests new interesting road to public and private data producers and providers. The European Commission acknowledged these opportunities that can significantly boost European competitiveness in the global market and in scientific research. One of the cornerstones of the process to build a common European data space is the possibility to access and share public and publicly funded data. This task has many important different goals: 1) citizens' secure access to and sharing of health data; 2) improving and innovating healthcare solutions based on mobile applications; 3) multiple uses of public sector information; 4) sharing scientific information, in order to facilitate the dissemination of results across countries; 5) Economics: Business to Business (B2B) data sharing, which considers the availability of "non personal machine-generated data". The new challenges suggest new problems to be faced both on a legislative and on a methodological ground. From a legal perspective, data exchange between public Institutions and private agents requires a detailed national legislative framework, still missing in many European countries. From a methodological perspective, the interaction between public and private data holders poses complex problems: 1) privacy preserving record linkage: how to guarantee that the linkage of personal data coming from different sources will not jeopardize the privacy of single citizens and/or companies; 2) the use of linked data as input to more sophisticated statistical analyses without unplanned information disclosure. Secure Multiparty Computation (SMC) techniques can play a role in this respect. In this Chapter we describe how the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) is facing the new challenges and what are the most important steps to take in the next future.