Your health records privacy in the UK

This is a problem, you think your data has been anonymised, but has it really?

The House of Lords has overruled the Scottish Information Commissioner's decision to allow the release of anonymized regional medical statistics, saying the data were still private and thus covered under the UK's Data Protection Act. According to Out-Law.com, the controversy stems from a request by a Scottish Parliamentary researcher for leukemia data related to children from 0-14 years of age from a specific postal region. The Lords' ruling was based on the low rate of incidents, which could have made it possible to correlate the data with individuals in spite of the fact that the data had been anonymized. Read more...