Towards controlled-privacy in e-health: A comparative study

Technological advances in electronic services have made it easier than ever before to access and share different kinds of data. In the healthcare sector, the exchange of patients' information between different actors (hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies...) improves diagnosis and treatment quality and reduces related costs. However, this exchange arise new security concerns and makes patient information subject to privacy breaches. In the literature, several privacy-preserving approaches have been proposed, most of which focus on protecting private data using cryptographic, access control or anonymitization techniques. Thus, the patient becomes a passive actor regarding the disclosure of his personal information. In this paper we consider the following question: should patients only rely on third parties to protect their sensitive data or shall they be granted some kind of control to select the level of privacy and security they want? In this context, we propose a comparative study of some recent work in the area of e-services privacy. The analysis of this study shows that data privacy is not fairly user controlled particularly in the health sector. © 2014 IEEE.