CHSPR Seminar | AI-Generated Synthetic Data Does More Harm than Good for Patient Privacy

Speaker: Bret Nestor, UBC Centre for Health Services and Policy Research

Synthetic medical data is increasingly being adopted to protect patients’ privacy while increasing data accessibility for researchers. This talk explores the “no free lunch” theorem as it pertains to synthetic clinical data. Synthetic data land on a spectrum between useful and non-private, or non-useful and private. We audit for private patient information by conducting membership inference attacks against a variety of privacy preservation defenses. We find that synthetic data harm the most vulnerable patients more…