A Legal Evaluation of Pseudonymization Approaches

Abstract—Privacy is one of the fundamental issues in health care today and a fundamental right of every individual. Several laws were enacted that demand the protection of patients ’ privacy. However, approaches for protecting privacy often do not comply with legal requirements or basic secu-rity requirements. This paper highlights research directions currently pursued for privacy protection in e-health and evaluates common pseudonymization approaches against legal criteria taken from Directive 95/46/EC and HIPAA. Thereby, it supports decision makers in deciding on privacy systems and researchers in identifying the gaps of current approaches for privacy protection as a basis for further research. Keywords-security, privacy, pseudonymization, e-health I