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When a person consents to sharing their health data, they may inadvertently reveal sensitive information about the people with whom they interact. For example, someone who submits an oral swab for analysis could expose shared microbial signatures that provide information about others in their orbit, without those individuals' knowledge or consent. This is called a breach of relational privacy.

In a commentary published in Trends in Microbiology, researchers at Yale University argue that the collection of biological data inherently involves relational privacy risks, and advancements in biomedical and data science are increasing the need for enhanced relational privacy protections.

The team used the human microbiome—the collection of microorganisms that live on and in the body—to illustrate how an individual's biological data might reflect that of the people around them.

"Your microbiome is a sum of all your interactions," says Bianca Brown of Yale and the University of Cambridge, U.K. "Imagine if you swabbed everyone in your community. You'd find a clustering of microbiomes, generally depending on who is interacting with whom."

The closer the relationship between two people, the more their microbiomes overlap. For instance, partners, family members, friends and neighbors tend to have more overlap than coworkers or classmates.

Beyond uncovering social interactions, the microbiome can carry signatures of a person's health and physiology. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, public health professionals used viral genome sequencing to trace community spread of SARS-CoV-2—but had to tailor their tracing methods to avoid compromising relational privacy.

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