Skip to content

Comment on The NHS is selling your private data – here's the price list [pdf]

Comments

Whoever gets their hands on this data should build a "20 Questions" game, to identify a person's NHS number. Knowing something of my neighbour's recent medical history, I'm pretty sure it'd take 10 questions or less.

Are there any restrictions on publishing the data? I can't find licensing terms.

Not exactly licensing terms but page 3 of the price list states that extracts subject to an annual fee will continue to be charged that fee until it is certified that all hard and soft copies of the data have been destroyed.

Other than that I'm guessing they will enforce some pretty draconian restrictions on publishing and sharing the data since doing so would undermine their ability to sell the data.

So the UK govt aren't even claiming that this data is public information, and charging a processing fee for it -- the govt is claiming that citizen's personal health information is owned by the goverment with privileges to restrictively license it to commercial customers!

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.