Navigating the tradeoff between personal privacy and data utility in speech anonymization for clinical research.

Diaz-Asper, Catherine; Bongo, Lars Ailo; Elvevåg, Brita · NPJ Digit Med · 2025

review · Level V

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Abstract

Speech data inherently contains personally identifiable information. Anonymization strategies to obscure this while preserving essential characteristics all represent a tradeoff between privacy and utility. We examine this balancing act of modifying voice characteristics, masking identity, and eliminating identifiable content by showcasing challenges with the common techniques-generalization, suppression, anatomization, permutation, and perturbation-in the context of preserving utility for individual level speech data analyses in clinical research.