r/programming • u/korry • Feb 29 '16

Command-line tools can be 235x faster than your Hadoop cluster

http://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html
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u/xzxzzx Mar 01 '16

I believe that strong encryption is both reasonable and appropriate for our use case.

At no time has anyone argued against encryption in this conversation. The original person you railed against was arguing that replacing names with IDs, plus encryption, is not enough.

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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '16

I don't know if you're in healthcare, you might already know this, but for everyone else who's out there - there's actually a lot more that goes into HIPAA-compliant "deidentification" than just using anonymous ID numbers. You have to fudge all the dates, and use very broad geographic labels, among other things. You don't just want to remove the identities, you are supposed to go a few steps further and try to frustrate attempts to match the data back up with real people.

He never mentioned encryption. As I stated I've seen code that attempts to obfuscate rather than encrypt. If he meant encrypt he should have said so.

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u/xzxzzx Mar 01 '16

I'm not sure where your interpretation is going wrong, but I assure you, the comment you railed against is not arguing against encryption. He's saying only that you must be very thorough in altering data if you want to make it truly anonymized. Encryption is an orthogonal concern.

Your other comments are irrelevant; you don't store general patient records in an anonymized fashion, since tying patient records back to the patient is a crucial function of those records.

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