Medical data of half a million Britons listed for sale on Chinese website, government says

Too bad the UK have left the EU, they’re on their own now.

Health research relies on data. In this case this was anonymised data for research on Parkinson’s and cancer and was maintained by a charity so other institutions can use it for their studies. This data is already semi-public and has been modified so that people cannot be identified if records were released. It has been taken down because it was being sold contrary to the terms of the licence of the dataset Simply mandating that health organisations cannot maintain digital data is simply not realistic

There's a reason the Cybersecurity > Homesteading timeline exists. We aren't coding for security, we're coding for profit.

The best I can think of, is you have some form of digital if no, issued by the gov that is just yes you are over 18. Def has problems to do with anonymity. But got to be better than having to use signs ups that take all the other relevant data about you (like biometrics, passport photos etc, being held by third party companies who treat security as a cost reduction exercise. 

Good luck with anything being safe anymore. Anthropic’s Mythos will seem like Stone Age tech in a couple of years, with how exponentially AI capability is ramping up.

And without digital processing the UK will go backwards. You cannot have better healthcare and services without the knowledge gained of what we need.

> Our government (both sides of the fence) has consistently shown it cannot legislate the digital domain with any form of effectiveness. It's crazy to me how incompetent and tech illiterate all these GenX and older Millennial politicians are. The government has digital records of people's ID, their passports, driving licences, etc. They could just have a token verification system where signing up, where you can generate a seecure token that can bee used on third party websites. The actual ID information remains in government hands, but you can still verify things online. But it's always all or nothing with these luddites. They get a presentation from some tech startup that promises the world and that they'll safely and securely handle people's personal data, and lo behold, there are inveitable breaches and fuckups because they in fact, did not safely or securely handle the data and kept it in some plain text file or some shit.

Such proposal never even made sense, it's in the realms of "not even wrong" since what a blockchain provides (distributed trust done through consensus by a cluster of untrustworthy clients without a centralised entity) has no application whatsoever to medical records, lol.

You CAN trust blockchain and the well-researched mathematically provable security. You CANNOT trust the HUMANS operates or uses them.

I mean, you can find anyone on the internet to call you an idiot for any reason. Why have you been carrying that random online interaction all these years?

Because when you c**** out on contracts, fail to set up adequate oversight and security, and fail to learn from your mistakes because "it’s not our problem", you share some of the responsibility. The governing bodies and those deciding on contracts need to have vetted organisations and gone through a whole assessment process before awarding massive contracts, and they do for the most part. There are whole departments across government for this exact purpose, and if they haven't done their jobs you end up with data breaches, millions wasted in useless PPE during a pandemic, and corruption and cronyism when dishing out multimillion pound contracts to your friends. Those responsible for all of that might have done their job properly and it's solely the fault of the 3rd party. Or they could have cheaped out, not done their dilligence, or pocketed some nice bonuses awarding the contract to a company that didn’t exist a week ago. Either way there needs to be oversight and accountability at each level, otherwise we won’t know what went wrong, and the same thing can just happen again and again. It's what every functional organisation and government that has ever negotiated a contract does as standard, not really a difficult or "libertarian" concept. There are billions of pounds of taxpayer's money in these contracts, there should at least be *some* accountability and review of processes there...

Because the government is trying to force digital ID's on citizens for goods and services that don't nor shouldn't require it in a time of the digital age where hackers and data breaches are a consistent and very real risk. People don't like having their personal information being given out without their consent, yet it's increasingly being made to. And there are a lot of bad actors who either take the data and sells it to whoever for their own profit while the people whose data is being sold gets told nothing nor benefit from it. Even worse with foreign powers taking that information for any number of potential reasons that can easily constitute a severe security risk for a nation or a constant annoyance and violation to one's personally autonomy. Even worse if it's anything to do with one's financial data, which causes a whole number of problems for individuals where their lives can be impacted to severely ruined.

Mandated use via those chosen third parties. If someone is contracted to build a house and the carpenter causes problems and does a runner, it's ultimately the primary contractors responsibility to sort it out for the client, not to just point at the carpenter and say "not my fault". But it is their fault if they hired the man.

Because governments are enforcing *mandatory* age verification without providing a government tool for it, so companies and the governments themselves are forced to outsource it to third party companies? Get your own logic circuits sorted out.

What data do you think digital ID will give them that they don’t already have?

[deleted]

Typing sex is too much for you but killing is fine?

Back when the NHS was being digitised in the 90s they wanted people to be given "smart cards" with a memory chip that would hold their medical records because the IT guys at the time did not believe that security could be maintained across the internet and worried that even if it could necessary equipment that could not be renewed would be a massive issue.

It was via Redcentric at the time, HSCN it's called (replaced 3N), they were paying £30k/mo for that link 😭

I doubt this charity is making tonnes of money for dataset access. I would be intrigued how much they were paying institutions to access it.

Agreed

Isn't there already pretty comprehensive legitimate means of purchasing this kind of data? Social media companies, for example, already have pretty robust population data on their users. Also, on broad population scales, isn't a lot of this kind of data already available through research, government statistics, and other legitimate means? For a medical company attempting to develop a long-term business strategy, this seems like a pretty strange way to go about it.

>Many scientists can use these data in their research. I mean, I know that China isn't exactly the most ethical country, but any major journal would immediately reject research published on such unethically sourced data, and the scientists could further be blacklisted too. Any credible scientist would have to be out of their f****** mind to purchase this data, let alone publish research based on it.

How? They have no identifying information associated with them - it's basically just a bunch of data.

Do you mean advertisements?

Oh you must have missed all the hype behind the Online Safety Act and how it was supposed to bring about safety and security for children in the digital space. What it ended up being though, is a vehicle to legally mandate the gathering of personal data on even more British citizens than ever before and the erosion of the one thing truly protecting most people online - anonymity. Welcome to the UK. Your info’s for sale. Your children’s info is for sale. Time to see what your geopolitical adversaries do with it now that all the warnings from security specialists went unheeded by politicians bought and paid for by foreign interests.

I do generally score high on the couric scale, but im referring to my monster hog

I mean, the article doesn't actually answer the question. The data held by Biobank, who made it available to, quoting directly from the article "researchers at three academic institutions" was found to be for sale. Cool. So did researchers at those institutions offer the data for sale, or did a compromise of those institutions' systems get the data stolen and offered for sale, or do those institutions use a health data aggregation platform, such as the one offered by, say, Palantir, and was the operator of that platform compromised or did it directly steal the data and offer it for sale? The article very much does not answer this question whatsoever.

Theoretically, but in reality - you need lots and lots of identifiable data to match it against. So you can 'add' to existing data, but it's not that easy to go in blind and re-identify.