UK Police And Companies Will Have Access To Database Of All England's Medical Records
from the privacy-disaster-waiting-to-happen dept
The UK government is currently building a database called care.data that will contain all of England's medical records. It's being promoted as providing valuable information for healthcare management and medical researchers that will lead to improved treatment.
Given the extremely sensitive nature of the material that will be stored, you might have expected this to be opt-in, but instead the UK government has chosen to make it opt-out. Not only that, but the relatively sparse information about what was happening was sent in the form of a generic, unaddressed letter that differs little from the dozens of junk mail pieces received by most households each week, and failed to include any easy-to-use opt-out form.
This has fuelled suspicions that the UK government is making it hard to opt out in order to keep the numbers enrolled in the database as high as possible. More recently, good reasons why people might want to avoid the scheme have emerged. For example, it was revealed that as well as being provided to research scientists, the database could also be bought by companies:
Drug and insurance companies will from later this year be able to buy information on patients -- including mental health conditions and diseases such as cancer, as well as smoking and drinking habits -- once a single English database of medical data has been created.
Now we learn that the UK police will also have access:
The database that will store all of England's health records has a series of "backdoors" that will allow police and government bodies to access people's medical data.
As the UK MP David Davis told the Guardian:
"The idea that police will be able to request information from a central database without a warrant totally undermines a long-held belief in the confidentiality of the doctor-patient relationship," he said.
That means that as well as the risk of a privacy disaster of unprecedented proportions if the consolidated health data is lost or stolen as a result of being passed to third parties (as has already happened with a similar but smaller database), patients may be less likely to confide in their doctors knowing that details will end up in a database sold to companies and freely available to the police. Nice work, Mr Cameron.
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Filed Under: companies, database, healthcare data, medical records, nhs, police, privacy, uk
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If that is their security practice what hope is their for everybodies data in the database?
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Civilian casualties (dead and/or missing) over 110 million
Military casualties (dead and/or missing) under 1 million.
European theatre. I didn't look at the estimates for the Asian theatre.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#USSR
Military casualties for the Soviet Union alone are in the multiple millions range, so I'd like to know where you got your under 1 million number from.
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Anyway, Hitler was a moderately competent genocidal maniac
and we can safely say that Cameron is neither a maniac, nor genocidal, or for that matter competent.
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Hitler was defeated!
So far Cameraon hasn't been!
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Plus, I don't think there were even 6 million Indians in the US to kill.
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In any case, Godwin's Law applies.
As does the phrase, "Sold us down the river."
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1. Create a profile of the population. Race, Health, Foreigners, any undesired type.
2. When in full control, purge the undesirables.
3. Profit!
Applies to companies by replacing 2 with "don't hire undesirables.
Cameron is one kind of an asshole eh?
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The profit, I presume, is to pay for the building of the database now that he's given all our money away to the rich so they can hide it in offshore accounts. Apparently, this was supposed to trickle down to us, but I've seen none of it so far.
As you Americans say, "Follow the money." If the trail leads to a Tory MP with a directorship or relative in the company involved, it's a fair bet that the profit will be going to him or her.
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The state needs a bogey man to blame problems on. They pick a minority group which the broader population is already uncomfortable with (typically for irrational reasons), and demonize and dehumanize them. Once they do it to the Jews/Gays/Arabs/whoever, it's much easier to get away with it for others. Slippery slope, etc...
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Re: Access to medical data
Our government have harvested much information already from surveillance of our private data
Think about it, facebook, twitter etc. They know many's political views, search your ancestry type databases give them your complete family " racial" status, now health records complete the picture. Now what on earth could the " police" do with our records? Add surveillance drones with " corporate" entities in charge. We do not have a bright future
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Time to properly opt out of this shit.
Dave and his government have yet to do anything positive since they got into power. I guess we will get Labour in the next election, not that it will change much.
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Re: no medical record of politicians
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However, i think this principal becomes fairly dubious when it isn't automatically anonymized - there is no reason to keep individual records with unique markers on a database - it poses threats to personal privacy, and given the fairly rampant abuses of trust we've seen from various government agencies, i see no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt that the information won't be inappropriately accessed/compromised in some capacity.
Also; the unique interpretation of 'opt-out' is a fairly Orwellian linguistic creep, it's an interesting (if not frightening) example of the ways in which language can be manipulated to obscure understanding and debate.
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'Taxpayer money could be used to have scientists put up stats we ideologically disagree with hence cannot be reasoned with! Slash budgets/cancel programs/close down veterans and Canada Oceans libraries, throw all that data in the garbage! (tons of scientists have garbage dumped to get literally tons of knowledge going back to 1800's) while the government promises it still has one copy of each of these books and will digitize them. How much do you guys bet they will then only sell that data which used to be public domain afterwards?
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Even if I filed that form, it said something that my privacy wouldn't be as protected as if I had filled that form about a year before. (they didn't word it this way, but I wasn't as protected as the people who knew about it a year before there was ANY publicity about this in the media) meaning obviously that all health workers like docs, nurses and the others obviously had a chance to fill the form before said date, i think it was march 2012 and I filled the form in 2013. I forgot what extra protections filling the form before march 2012 did, but it was such an obvious HAHA FUCK YOU to anybody who procured the form online after that date (those mailed to people did not have this information).
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so pretty much anyone who works for these corps or govs has access , that only leaves about 100 people out who won't know about your medical history.
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But that being said, to then allow warrantless access to the records, and selling the data, that's a much different story. While selling the data might make sense if you remove basic identifying info from it to keep it anonymous, since there are legitimate uses of it, the police having warrant-less access to the database is not. Plus, throwing backdoors into the database for the cops makes it less secure.
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How long until the entire database shows up on Wikileaks?
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was about storing data of innocent people.
this is another clear cut case.
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http://www.theguardian.com/law/2013/sep/30/conservitives-scrap-human-rights-act
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And how is this 'legal' again?
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I might start myself a company.
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Priorities?
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Britons love surveillance
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"Your date of birth, full postcode, NHS Number and gender rather than your name will be used to link your records in a secure system, managed by the HSCIC. Once this information has been linked, a new record will be created. This new record will not contain information that identifies you. The type of information shared, and how it is shared, is controlled by law and strict confidentiality rules."
See, the database will not contain information that identifies you. Problem solved.
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It's even worse than you thought
Link: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/06/police-backdoor-access-nhs-health-records
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So what happens to the MAJORITY of people who dont even KNOW aboit it, where was THEIR choice, will you then make the argument to future protests that
"Well, many people have signed onto it already, so it must be ok"
Fucking predictable fucking behaviour
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Coming to an Amerika near you
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BE QUICK!
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Gambling on death made easy.
Not surprising at all, since corporations now take out insurance on their employees such that, should an employee die on the job, the company wins a huge insurance settlement.
This has become common practice and by getting the government to make all the medical records legally available to the corporations, they can better determine which employees are most likely to die on the job and thus can place their bets better.
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