Data Cleaning publication categorizer

Many genome-based research projects include familial
relationships, such as pedigrees, with genomic data
records. To protect anonymity when sharing family
information, data holders remove, or encode, explicit
identifiers (e.g. personal name). In this paper,
however, we introduce IdentiFamily, a software
program that can link de-identified family relations to
named people. The program extracts genealogical
knowledge from publicly available records and
ascertains the re-identification risk for specific family
relations. We find robust genealogies on current
populations can be extracted from online sources, such
as newspaper obituaries and death records. We
evaluate IdentiFamily on real world data for a state’s
capital city and demonstrate unique identifiability for
approximately 70% of the population. IdentiFamily
provides organizations with a tool to evaluate the
anonymity of pedigrees prior to disclosure and design
formal privacy protection techniques.