I’m at the launch in London of the new campaign for medical privacy, MedConfidential.org. Sam Smith and I will be liveblogging the day’s events in comments below. For background, see here, here, here and here. Most of today’s audience are from groups for whom medical privacy is particularly important, such as charities dealing with rape … Continue reading Liveblog – MedConfidential.org launch
Last week I spoke at a conference on digital health at the Scottish parliament. The talks are now online; my talk is here, and my slides here. At present, medical records in Scotland are organised differently under its fourteen different health boards, with wide variations in privacy, safety and functionality. Needless to say, officials in … Continue reading Health record privacy in Scotland
The government has once again returned to the vision of giving each of us an electronic health record shared throughout the NHS. This is about the fourth time in twenty years yet its ferocity has taken doctors by surprise. Seventeen years ago, I was advising the BMA on safety and privacy, and we explained patiently … Continue reading Privacy considered harmful?
This afternoon, the Information Commissioner will unveil a code of practice for data anonymisation. His office is under pressure; as I described back in August, Big Pharma wants all our medical records and has persuaded the Prime Minister it should have access so long as our names and addresses are removed. The theory is that … Continue reading Will the Information Commissioner be consistent?
The Guardian has published an op-ed I wrote on the risks of anonymised medical records along with a news article on CPRD, a system that will make our medical records available for researchers from next month, albeit with the names and addresses removed. The government has been pushing for this since last year, having appointed … Continue reading The rush to 'anonymised' data
I spent last week attending Financial Cryptography on Bonaire (a small Dutch island in the Caribbean), along with its attached workshops on Ethics in Computer Security Research and Usable Security. As usual, the conference attracted a broad spectrum of papers mixing applied cryptography and miscellaneous financial security problems (including our own group’s work on PIN … Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: Financial Crypto 2012
I will be talking in London on Wednesday at a workshop on Anonymity, Privacy, and Open Data about the difficulty of anonymising medical records properly. I’ll be on a panel with Kieron O’Hara who wrote a report on open data for the Cabinet Office earlier this year, and a spokesman from the ICO. This will … Continue reading Privacy event on Wednesday
The Sunday media have been trailing a speech by David Cameron tomorrow about giving us online access to our medical records and our kids’ school records, and making anonymised versions of them widely available to researchers, companies and others. Here is coverage in the
Britain’s phone hacking scandal touches many issues of interest to security engineers. Murdoch’s gumshoes listened to celebs’ voicemail messages using default PINs. They used false-pretext phone calls – blagging – to get banking and medical records. We’ve known for years that private eyes blag vast amounts of information (2001 book, from page 167; 2006 ICO … Continue reading Phone hacking, technology and policy
A number of media organisations have been asking us about Wikileaks. Fifteen years ago we kicked off the study of censorship resistant systems, which inspired the peer-to-peer movement; we help maintain Tor, which provides the anonymous communications infrastructure for Wikileaks; and we’ve a longstanding interest in information policy. I have written before about governments’ love … Continue reading Wikileaks, security research and policy