 To some, this may suggest that fully-fledged informed consent requirements simply do not apply to highly benign interventions. Surely the need to protect health and welfare, at least, through informed consent procedures is lesser when that risk is negligible in the first place. Interestingly, similar logic suggests that when an intervention is not benign yet informed consent cannot improve upon other protections, informed consent may be unnecessary. A possible case in point is observational studies of anonymized electronic health records, where the main risk comes from breach of data security and confidentiality—a serious yet technical matter that few individual patients could assess reliably—and thus informed consent (on top of expert input and democratic decision making) might be an ineffective, unhelpful protection.