This can only go well.
NHS OKs offshoring patient data to cloud providers stateside
The UK's National Health Service has said that Brits' patient data can be stored in the cloud – and has given US data centres party to Privacy Shield the thumbs-up. In a major policy shift, NHS Digital has given care providers the go-ahead to store patient information outside Blighty in a bid to hurry them into the cloud to …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 23rd January 2018 15:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Crucial
Nope, if you actually drilled into the details of what they were planning on doing, it was using medical records to spot patterns and lead to early diagnosis of many serious diseases.
As it is, the Luddites pretty much put a stop to it. Lets hope you, or your loved ones never suffer from a preventable disease, just because of some Internet click-bait outraged people with some half truth sensationalism.
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Tuesday 23rd January 2018 17:16 GMT Sir Runcible Spoon
Re: Luddites
This Luddite would be happy for truly anonymized data to be used thus, but as has been shown time and time again, there are ways to stitch it all back together with other datasets that completely undo all the anonymization.
Still, since when did we have a say about what happens to *our* data. We are slaves who must do as we are bid, else we face the wrath of
Khanthe SJW's!! -
Tuesday 23rd January 2018 18:13 GMT Adam 52
Re: Crucial
" it was using medical records to spot patterns and lead to early diagnosis of many serious diseases"
No it wasn't. It was to spot certain forms of Acute Kidney Injury.
Google and the Royal Free never explained why they needed patient identifying data to do that, and they never explained why they needed 1.6 million mostly unrelated records, nor why that data wasn't properly secured. That's probably because it wasn't necessary. As multiple independent investigations found.
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Tuesday 23rd January 2018 22:00 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Crucial
"Nope, if you actually drilled into the details of what they were planning on doing, it was using medical records to spot patterns and lead to early diagnosis of many serious diseases."
Maybe so, but why would the data need to be moved to a jurisdiction where we know for a fact that foreign owned data has no protections from the local government? Maybe Google can't afford local servers where they could handle the data in line with the laws of the data source country?
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Monday 22nd January 2018 17:05 GMT anothercynic
Re: Why Don't We Have a Choice ???
MPs haven't even seen this... and if they have, it's likely to be buried in some report they just scanned over. And despite the current government's belief in this misplaced thing called 'the special relationship' with the US, Privacy Shield is not worth the paper it's printed on.
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Monday 22nd January 2018 19:57 GMT JohnFen
Re: Why Don't We Have a Choice ???
"Why don't we the UK public have a choice to opt out, or state that our data is not available, or cannot be store outside the UK, and no non-UK entity can have access "
I hope my brothers and sisters in the UK fights for this. Here in the US, we have no choice. You can be sure that pretty much all health care providers are tied into the cloud now, much to my dismay.
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Monday 22nd January 2018 16:54 GMT Paul Kinsler
Re: And your proof of that assertion is... ?
Presumably they were referring to the involvement of the defence contractor Lockheed Martin UK, a wholly owned subsidiary of the US defence contractor Lockheed Martin, see e.g.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jan/27/120-convicted-census-forms-2011
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Monday 22nd January 2018 15:07 GMT Doctor Syntax
"That deal, which allows firms to sign up by self-certifying to the US Department of Commerce"
Self-certify what? That they're wide open to any US official that wants access? Until the DoJ/Microsoft case is resolved we can't even be sure that data is safe with US providers even if it's never off-shored.
The NHS needs an effective data guardian.
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Tuesday 23rd January 2018 09:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Privacy Shield
Agreed. I have previously reviewed the assessment process. As far as I could tell the only assessment was whether the correct sum of money was on the bank account at the correct time. There was certainly no assessment of the actual data storage environment, the network and external audit was not allowed.
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Monday 22nd January 2018 15:12 GMT Warm Braw
You can tell how well though out this is...
The NHS risk document identifies the following Government Security Classifications, intended to identify different levels of information sensitivity across government departments and their suppliers:
- Official
- Official-sensitive
- Secret
- Top-secret
They then identify all of the various levels of sensistivity of patient information (from aggregated statistics through to clinical information and contact information for people at threat). Apart from publicly-disseminated information (such as numbers of people suffering from 'flu), everything maps to Official-Sensitive - even the key material encrypting the data because:
Whilst we need such data to be treated to the highest standards, they do not fit into the government policy criteria for SECRET or TOP-SECRET.
So the government, in 2014, adopted a system of security classification that is entirely inapplicable to the health data in its possession. And no doubt equally inapplicable to sensitive information about child protection, vulnerable adults, taxation and who knows what else. And is then pushing its departments to push that data out into the public cloud.
A dispassionate observer might conclude they were concerned only with the preservation of their own secrets.
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Tuesday 23rd January 2018 14:18 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: You can tell how well though out this is...
were concerned only with the cost of preservation of the secrets, regardless of any impact
There, fixed.
PS: Are the Government and all it's little tentacles still beholden to DPA/GDPR? Because it seems to me that handing such data over to people not under the rigours of GDPR is setting themselves up for a loss in either the High Court or the European Court of Human Rights..
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Monday 22nd January 2018 15:25 GMT Laura Kerr
But, but... it's the cloud! Everyone else is doing it, so it must be good. And look! Here are some slides prepared by our world-class consultants, Churnham and Fleece, that show how much money we can save. Do pay attention.
Oh, for goodness' sake. I haven't got time to listen to all this technical drivel and scaremongering nonsense about American interference. The Americans are our friends and would never do anything untoward with our information. They told us so.
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Tuesday 23rd January 2018 17:21 GMT Sir Runcible Spoon
The linked-to document pretends to be some kind of decision tree to evaluate use of cloud services, but it basically pre-supposes that you *will* use the Cloud (it gives no direction as to what to do if you think it shouldn't) and that you should just be prepared to whether the public shit-storm that will ensue from a breach.
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Tuesday 23rd January 2018 09:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
PLEASE don't listen to the reminders, our glorious vice-leader with the mop up his head has already clarified that the 350 milion saved per week will actually be AT LEAST twice that. Same with this deal. We'll be rich, all rich.
Now, if we could somehow outsource all our NHS. Better still all the users of the NHS, we'd be even richer!
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Monday 22nd January 2018 17:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Response
As I've worked in the UK but run all my jobs (includign interactive edits/debug/etc) on servers in California for the last 3 years then while the "laws of physics" means there's a slightly slower response time than from a local server it's not noticeable so this is a pretty specious argument.
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Tuesday 23rd January 2018 13:22 GMT Queeg
Re: So...
Might I suggest one of the following.
http://static.adweek.com/adweek.com-prod/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/06/BewareOfSarcasm.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/591312552669351937/USRF3YMB.jpg
http://refe99.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Life-Love-Quotes-Sarcasm-Because-Beating.jpg
https://ih0.redbubble.net/image.131276572.2426/flat,800x800,075,f.u2.jpg
http://goodquotesword.com/images/92077/z4i_quotes_about_being_s.jpg
Please feel free to add your own.
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Tuesday 23rd January 2018 09:43 GMT Adam 52
Re: Data protection?
So what are you doing about it? Have you complained? Have you written the the ICO? Have you moaned to your MP? Have you asked for an injunction prevention the sharing of your data?
Moan as much as you like here, but unless you take action elsewhere nothing will change.
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Tuesday 23rd January 2018 17:26 GMT Sir Runcible Spoon
Re: Data protection?
What are we doing about it?
There's fuck all we can do about it, and no that isn't me being pessimistic. Please direct me to one (just one) instance where emailing your MP or writing to the ICO has had more than a 'fart in a hurricane's worth of different.
Social media outrage and public awareness have much more effect these days, whether we like it or not.
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