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Oral

Environmental

Privacy in the Pipes: Safeguarding Privacy in Fine-spatial Scale Wastewater-based Testing Research

Monday, May 19, 2025
5:45 PM – 6:00 PM Alaska Daylight Time (AKDT)
Room: Room 7 & 8
Abstract Submission: Wastewater-based testing (WBT) at fine-spatial scales offers significant potential for monitoring, antimicrobial resistance research, and supporting wastewater utilities by identifying illicit discharges. However, ethical concerns arise regarding the potential misuse of sensitive information at building, neighborhood, or community levels. These privacy concerns echo long-standing issues in human subjects research, which has led to the development of methods to anonymize data and mitigate ethical risks. This work advocates for a suite of functions designed to protect privacy in fine-spatial WBT by anonymizing data using techniques such as statistical anonymization, geomasking, and network skeletonization. We identify these methods from other domains and evaluate their feasibility and performance for sewer networks. The evaluation is based on three criteria: 1) whether the method is independent of sewer network structure or aligns with an arborescent sewer network, 2) the availability of code and computational demands, and 3) the impact on modeling errors and the balance between privacy and model performance. The goal is to advance WBT research while addressing ethical concerns related to privacy.

Learning Objectives/Expected Outcome (Optional) : Authors: Corinne Wiesner-Friedman1, Caleb Buahin1, Michael Tryby1, Audrey Laiveling2, Tim Wade1, Anne Mikelonis1, Nichole Brinkman1, Scott Keely1, Benjamin Davis1, Scott Bessler3
1U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development
2 Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education
3Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati