Reply to post: Re: "100,000 Genomes Project is secure, insists chair"...

Brits' DNA data sent to military base after 'foreign' hack attacks – report

Threlkeld

Re: "100,000 Genomes Project is secure, insists chair"...

After over 70 years I'd guess that my medical records could be matched to me even if ‘anonymised’. Only the radical pruning out of such details as time and place might prevent this.

The data may be 'safe' in a bunker, but it's only going to be useful in the hands of researchers. And they will be in universities and big pharma research labs all round the world. Granted, many will only have a subset of the whole, but they certainly won't be in bunkers. I wonder what kind of security conditions will be imposed, and how well those conditions will be policed?

In any case, since expertise is needed to make any sense of the medical data it is probably easier for big national or commercial interests to employ that same expertise to craft really good research applications, obtain the data legitimately, and then feel free pass it on to any dark-side entity with which they might have a quiet understanding. Again, I wonder what kind of security conditions can be imposed, and how on Earth those conditions could be policed?

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