De-Health: All Your Online Health Information Are Belong to Us

In this paper, we study the privacy of online health data. We present a novel online health data De-Anonymization (DA) framework, named De-Health. Leveraging two real world online health datasets WebMD and HealthBoards, we validate the DA efficacy of De-Health. We also present a linkage attack framework which can link online health/medical information to real world people. Through a proof-of-concept attack, we link 347 out of 2805 WebMD users to real world people, and find the full names, medical/health information, birthdates, phone numbers, and other sensitive information for most of the re-identified users. This clearly illustrates the fragility of the privacy of those who use online health forums.

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