
This can only go well.
The UK's National Health Service has said that Brits' patient data can be stored in the cloud – and has given US data centres party to Privacy Shield the thumbs-up. In a major policy shift, NHS Digital has given care providers the go-ahead to store patient information outside Blighty in a bid to hurry them into the cloud to …
Nope, if you actually drilled into the details of what they were planning on doing, it was using medical records to spot patterns and lead to early diagnosis of many serious diseases.
As it is, the Luddites pretty much put a stop to it. Lets hope you, or your loved ones never suffer from a preventable disease, just because of some Internet click-bait outraged people with some half truth sensationalism.
This Luddite would be happy for truly anonymized data to be used thus, but as has been shown time and time again, there are ways to stitch it all back together with other datasets that completely undo all the anonymization.
Still, since when did we have a say about what happens to *our* data. We are slaves who must do as we are bid, else we face the wrath of Khan the SJW's!!
" it was using medical records to spot patterns and lead to early diagnosis of many serious diseases"
No it wasn't. It was to spot certain forms of Acute Kidney Injury.
Google and the Royal Free never explained why they needed patient identifying data to do that, and they never explained why they needed 1.6 million mostly unrelated records, nor why that data wasn't properly secured. That's probably because it wasn't necessary. As multiple independent investigations found.
"Nope, if you actually drilled into the details of what they were planning on doing, it was using medical records to spot patterns and lead to early diagnosis of many serious diseases."
Maybe so, but why would the data need to be moved to a jurisdiction where we know for a fact that foreign owned data has no protections from the local government? Maybe Google can't afford local servers where they could handle the data in line with the laws of the data source country?
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MPs haven't even seen this... and if they have, it's likely to be buried in some report they just scanned over. And despite the current government's belief in this misplaced thing called 'the special relationship' with the US, Privacy Shield is not worth the paper it's printed on.
"Why don't we the UK public have a choice to opt out, or state that our data is not available, or cannot be store outside the UK, and no non-UK entity can have access "
I hope my brothers and sisters in the UK fights for this. Here in the US, we have no choice. You can be sure that pretty much all health care providers are tied into the cloud now, much to my dismay.
Presumably they were referring to the involvement of the defence contractor Lockheed Martin UK, a wholly owned subsidiary of the US defence contractor Lockheed Martin, see e.g.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jan/27/120-convicted-census-forms-2011
"That deal, which allows firms to sign up by self-certifying to the US Department of Commerce"
Self-certify what? That they're wide open to any US official that wants access? Until the DoJ/Microsoft case is resolved we can't even be sure that data is safe with US providers even if it's never off-shored.
The NHS needs an effective data guardian.
Agreed. I have previously reviewed the assessment process. As far as I could tell the only assessment was whether the correct sum of money was on the bank account at the correct time. There was certainly no assessment of the actual data storage environment, the network and external audit was not allowed.
The NHS risk document identifies the following Government Security Classifications, intended to identify different levels of information sensitivity across government departments and their suppliers:
They then identify all of the various levels of sensistivity of patient information (from aggregated statistics through to clinical information and contact information for people at threat). Apart from publicly-disseminated information (such as numbers of people suffering from 'flu), everything maps to Official-Sensitive - even the key material encrypting the data because:
Whilst we need such data to be treated to the highest standards, they do not fit into the government policy criteria for SECRET or TOP-SECRET.
So the government, in 2014, adopted a system of security classification that is entirely inapplicable to the health data in its possession. And no doubt equally inapplicable to sensitive information about child protection, vulnerable adults, taxation and who knows what else. And is then pushing its departments to push that data out into the public cloud.
A dispassionate observer might conclude they were concerned only with the preservation of their own secrets.
were concerned only with the cost of preservation of the secrets, regardless of any impact
There, fixed.
PS: Are the Government and all it's little tentacles still beholden to DPA/GDPR? Because it seems to me that handing such data over to people not under the rigours of GDPR is setting themselves up for a loss in either the High Court or the European Court of Human Rights..
But, but... it's the cloud! Everyone else is doing it, so it must be good. And look! Here are some slides prepared by our world-class consultants, Churnham and Fleece, that show how much money we can save. Do pay attention.
Oh, for goodness' sake. I haven't got time to listen to all this technical drivel and scaremongering nonsense about American interference. The Americans are our friends and would never do anything untoward with our information. They told us so.
The linked-to document pretends to be some kind of decision tree to evaluate use of cloud services, but it basically pre-supposes that you *will* use the Cloud (it gives no direction as to what to do if you think it shouldn't) and that you should just be prepared to whether the public shit-storm that will ensue from a breach.
PLEASE don't listen to the reminders, our glorious vice-leader with the mop up his head has already clarified that the 350 milion saved per week will actually be AT LEAST twice that. Same with this deal. We'll be rich, all rich.
Now, if we could somehow outsource all our NHS. Better still all the users of the NHS, we'd be even richer!
As I've worked in the UK but run all my jobs (includign interactive edits/debug/etc) on servers in California for the last 3 years then while the "laws of physics" means there's a slightly slower response time than from a local server it's not noticeable so this is a pretty specious argument.
Might I suggest one of the following.
http://static.adweek.com/adweek.com-prod/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/06/BewareOfSarcasm.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/591312552669351937/USRF3YMB.jpg
http://refe99.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Life-Love-Quotes-Sarcasm-Because-Beating.jpg
https://ih0.redbubble.net/image.131276572.2426/flat,800x800,075,f.u2.jpg
http://goodquotesword.com/images/92077/z4i_quotes_about_being_s.jpg
Please feel free to add your own.
So what are you doing about it? Have you complained? Have you written the the ICO? Have you moaned to your MP? Have you asked for an injunction prevention the sharing of your data?
Moan as much as you like here, but unless you take action elsewhere nothing will change.
What are we doing about it?
There's fuck all we can do about it, and no that isn't me being pessimistic. Please direct me to one (just one) instance where emailing your MP or writing to the ICO has had more than a 'fart in a hurricane's worth of different.
Social media outrage and public awareness have much more effect these days, whether we like it or not.
The government should build its own data centre and use it across government, the cost savings would be enormous.
You've not being following the government's performance on ANY major project, I take it?
If government built their own enormous data centre, it would built somewhere stupid for political reasons, be commissioned ten years later, cost three times the original budget, the cost savings would be negative, and it would inevitably turn out that they'd forgotten something vital like mains power connection, the UPS and standby, or the necessary bandwidth of data pipes. And probably built it the wrong size by three orders of magnitude plus or minus.
"Considering the number of times i've seen a GP look something up on google"
I work on rocket guidance systems and look things up using a search engine all of the time. I'd feel better if my doctor took the time to double check something or find information on something they weren't familiar with. There is way too much to know about human physiology for any one person to have remembered. I want my doctor to be absolutely sure about my condition and not in a big hurry to prescribe a bottle of antibiotics and send me on my way.
What could possibly go wrong, hmmm, lets ask all the US medical companies and government departments that have massive leaks in the couple of years. More importantly,if it does go wrong, how will it be investigated, if it even gets reported and those effected get compensation, even the NHS can't fight US lawyers !
scuse the pun...
Just as the rest of the world starts to notice that cloud storage, particularly massive cloud storage with big security requirements, mostly isn't as cheap as you thought it was, especially when you scale it... the British public sector comes crashing through the door with both feet.
But hey ho, better than it going to Capita
One part of the reason we keep getting poor decisions by politicians is that they do not get enough knowledgeable feedback on this sort of issue. They, poor dears, are, for the most part, semi-literate (i.e. not STEM educated) and the implications of many technical issues go right over their heads.
A challenge: how many of those complaining here about this potential clusterf**k have actually disturbed the electrons and made their views known to their MP? Tell them what you think is wrong, why you think it is wrong and what you consider the actions, rules, regulations needed are.
I am having that conversation with my local MP and the poor dear did not understand that handing data to any US company exposes it to silent access by the US government who ignored "Safe Harbor" and will ignore "Privacy Shield".
It needs more of those who do understand the issues to educate MP's rather than just let off steam on a forum. The MP's need hard facts and evidence of what their constituents want to counter the bureaucrats.
</rant>
p.s. I do not hold out much hope though, as you can not educate lard.
your MP about it, you'll just be regarded as another wack job out to ruin a great plan.
Hint : during the 'ban air soft guns' thing a few years ago, the government cited how easy it was to convert air soft guns to real ones.
I pointed out to our MP that a major gun manufacturer is based in the city and only 1/2 a mile from her office and that she could walk there and get expert advice within 10 mins.
Hello special branch......
"Hint : during the 'ban air soft guns' thing a few years ago, the government cited how easy it was to convert air soft guns to real ones."
They really said that? How could you convert a gun that fires small plastic bb's using gas/electric/springs to fire bullets? If that can be done easily, I would love to see the genius who managed it! Im sure it would be faster to craft a gun from scratch in a metalworkshop..
It never ceases to amaze me how ignorant MP's are about what they vote on...
And it scares me that they think these bans actually can achieve anything except take pleasure away from the enthusiasts.
The proles may have voted for Brexit but that wont stop the powers that be needlessly globalising everything. That we the people aren't consulted about how our own data is stored demonstrates how our "democracy" works. If we are consulted, it will be after they've implemented it so that reversing the decision will be costly and disruptive.
Even if cloud hosting costs are cheaper elsewhere, the data transmissions costs must be taken into account. It's probably worth paying more if the extra money is fed back into the local economy.
If the Russians are capable of tapping transatlantic cables, data security is at risk. In the event that they cut our communication links (or if they are cut by mistake or natural causes), the NHS wont have reliable access to patient data.
On one hand, the UK and Europe have passed and implemented some of the most comprehensive data privacy and security laws on the planet and now a branch of the government wants to save a few quid by off-shoring its data storage? That's completely bonkers. I see that type of thinking with governments that are complaining that their birth rates are dropping and how bad that is while at the same time the news if full of how so many jobs are being lost to automation and that the prospects that there will be more jobs created in the future to replace those is low to zero.
It's so common as to be suspect to hear in the US news that "some employee" had a laptop/memory card/external hard drive stolen, usually from their car, packed with sensitive personal data that they were taking home to work on after hours. In at least some of those incidents, there is a good probability that the data was being "stolen" to cover its being sold or if it shows up later that the theft can be ascribed as its source. Plausible deniability, baby. What happens when a load of NHS data gets lost/stolen, sold on the dark net and winds up in a data aggregators database? Nothing except the people affected are stuffed.
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As an NHS Data Security Professional, I shall not be transfering any data outside the EU, and am definatley not using the Pan Atlantic Profits Plaster as an excuse
However the chance to use EU cloud infrastucure, rather than the expensive UK only zones might allow some workloads to be effectivley cloud based (ofc the appropriate disclosures and legal justfication must be provided)
but considering the ancient propriatary software and data strucutres, cloudifying this lot will take donkeys