The Guardian is reporting that the Social Care Information Centre, which is to be formed in March will provide a unified, digitised medical database of all people the the UK.
While there appear be are some plus points such conducting statistical analysis to drugs and surgical performances, data that will be given out includes NHS numbers, DOB, Postcode ethnicity and gender. Access can be given to research departments, insurers and drug companies, and the process of extracting the requested data is being described as "pseudonymisation". This bears the risk that the data can be matched against third party datasets and thus individuals can be re-identified. The article does not mentions provisions, or lack thereof, about how this data, once given to drug companies could be moved outside the UK and processed there. Has anyone heard of this before? There are clearly gaping wholes and enormous risks involved in this sort of data merger and the "sell to anyone willing to to pay" approach. Means of protecting our medical histories to undisclosed third parties can barely be said to exist at all, and I believe this is a topic where we ought to be involved. kind regards, Wolfgang -- Please support ORG's work - join and help fund our future: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/join To unsubscribe, send a blank email to [email protected] or use https://lists.openrightsgroup.org/listinfo/org-discuss
