Post #1653320
2026-04-23 19:26 UTC
500,000 people's data is taken out of UK Biobank and put up for sale on Alibaba: https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/news/a-message-to-our-participants-uk-biobank-data-security-update/
UK Biobank demonstrating exactly the reasons I objected to these sorts of "Trusted Research Environments" that seem to give way too much unearned trust to "researchers" assuming that "legal contracts" are good enough to stop bad behaviour. But a contract doesn't stop data being taken. So they are *now* trying to come up with ways to stop large files being extracted from their data centre.
Replies (1)
-
@slowe@mastodon.me.uk 2026-04-23 19:31
Contrast this with Ben Goldacre's OpenSafely which was specifically designed so that researchers never got access to individual's data. Instead they submitted "questions" (with code) that was peer reviewed (in the open) with explicit checks to make sure no PII came out in the answers. Then the code ran inside the data centre and the answers returned. By design it put technical and structural breaks between researchers and PII to avoid these sorts of problem being able to occur.