UK Biobank leak: Health details of 500 000 people are offered for sale

149 points - today at 11:09 AM

Source

Comments

greg_dc today at 12:38 PM
In fairness, is this any worse than what Palantir will do with the whole countries NHS records? And they're being paid by the government to do it!
londons_explore today at 11:58 AM
There isn't much difference between giving this data to 20,000 researchers all over the world and simply publishing the data on the web.

I personally would like data like this to simply be published, together with a law that says using the data to make personalized decisions affecting those individuals is punishable with life in prison.

Basically, this data is 'opensource', but not for use to decide insurance premiums, job offers, or the contents of news articles.

mellosouls today at 1:02 PM
Already being discussed:

UK Biobank health data keeps ending up on GitHub

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875843

UK Biobank health data listed for sale in China, government confirms

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47874732

azan_ today at 12:04 PM
"Access this article for 1 day for: £50 / $60/ €56 (excludes VAT)" Man, the scientific publishing cartel is something else. Note that author will generally get exactly £0 / $0 / €0 for his text.
WalterGR today at 11:18 AM
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875843 “UK Biobank health data keeps ending up on GitHub”
noname120 today at 1:26 PM
How can the fulltext be accessed?
mentalgear today at 12:40 PM
> Data for sale included people’s gender, age, month and year of birth, socioeconomic status, lifestyle habits, mental health, self-reported medical history, cognitive function, and physical measures.

If this is not traceable back to individuals, it would probably good to be made public. But I assume the UK Biobank only gives access to trusted partners since - as we know in our 'data analytics' day and age - with enough general data quantity you can trace back anything to anyone if you have the resources. And the capitalist-surveillance econonmy certainly provides the profit-motive.

fragmede today at 11:50 AM
I want to get my DNA digitized so I can do all sorts of health stuff for myself, but finding a place that won't leak my data is troublesome. 23andme is right out.
scotty79 today at 12:22 PM
That kind of data should be public anyways.
Aboutplants today at 12:00 PM
Gonna wager the US government is the first to purchase