Hundreds of patient data breaches are left unpunished
What&#x27;s disappointing about issues like this is I worked on a specific transfer of health information from a govenrment health system to a university, and the attitude of the school researchers to privacy was practically obnoxious. They absolutely exploited the pandemic to squeeze the toothpaste out of the tube and get their hands on data sets that we actually have privacy protecting technologies to facilitate access to, but they were using the emergency powers to do a wholesale seizure of the data sets themselves.<p>Among the risks I specifically identified were that access to the patient data was the decision of a research ethics board whose decisions were not covered under privacy and access to information laws, and that the research organizations outright refused to allow their researchers to be identified individually - as per privacy laws that require all access to PHI to be by named individuals. The greater concern was once the data was in the hands of the university, they had no way of formally separating clinical research and broader access by social scientists, or worse, administrators with similar agendas, and questioning the integrity of some of the truly demented individuals who inhabit those institutions is apparently just not done.<p>Govenrment health information systems have rigorous privacy logs that admins check on a weekly and monthly basis to see if their staff are trolling through records for people they know, but the universities have no such controls, and their IT organizations are not enterprise quality. Modern tools like differential privacy, tokenization, data synthesis, and other techniques are absolutely sufficient to test hypothesis before working on production data, but their skillsets appeared more in navigating bureaucracy and political leverage, so they used the tools they had. I say obnoxious because there is a certain archetype of person who spits and sneers when they hear words like &quot;privacy,&quot; and their skillset often reduces to creating crisis&#x27; that always seem to have themselves in the middle, and it was well represented in the groups I dealt with. The NHS should take heed, as they are clearly being hustled.