Solving the privacy puzzle for complex streaming data

The National Long-Term Care Survey (NLTCS), archived by NACDA, contains longitudinal health and demographic information from elderly and disabled Medicare-enrolled Americans, collected over three decades between 1982 and 2004. Although the NLTCS is typically used for aging and disability research, in this paper computer scientists employed it to help validate a new privacy-protection technology system, EdgeSyn. It attempts to enable complex, sensitive streaming data from smart devices to be continuously published and available for analysis and other uses, without revealing private details about the individuals who created that data. The paper outlines the drawbacks of other approaches and how EdgeSyn addresses them. Part of the solution it employs is to create synthetic data that mimics the statistical patterns of real data without containing actual personal information. As part of their experimental evaluation of EdgeSyn, Tan et al. used the NLTCS, along with three other datasets chosen for their differences in size and attributes. EdgeSyn was able to create synthetic data that preserved the statistical relationships in the original survey, under various privacy protection levels. More publications that use NLTCS data can be found here.

September 25, 2025