Good. Imo, the fearmongering here is actually quite irrational. Google have more credibility (and money) to lose from a high publicity hack than government contractors who already act with impunity. If they'd invested in their own own map-reduce deployment we'd only be hearing another story about government contractors wasted millions of £ in taxpayers money on Big Brother data analysis.
> The extracted information will contain a person's NHS number, date of birth, postcode, ethnicity and gender.
Big woop? Your NHS# isn't used outside of the NHS or for anything of concern to most people, and your postcode (and address) is held on the unedited electoral roll by hundreds of organisations. Most people don't even opt-out of the edited register accessible for a small fee on 192.com
Why aren't us Brits worried about our credit histories and county court judgements being recorded and held by Equifax, an American company?
What specifically are people actually afraid of with regard to this data set sitting on Googles servers? I just don't get the regular public outcry about NHS data.
My postcode and date of birth if sufficient to uniquely identify me. What you seem to miss is that this then acts as a key into the medical information held in this data set. If it was just the NHS number, date of birth, postcode, ethnicity and gender that was available, nobody would have cared much.
That the electoral roll data is available is a further reason why this is bad: It means that by cross-indexing this data with the electoral roll or similar data, one can take the poorly semi-anonymised NHS data and undo a large percentage of the anonymisation, either completely or with a high degree of probability.
> What specifically are people actually afraid of with regard to this data set sitting on Googles servers? I just don't get the regular public outcry about NHS data.
The issue is not Google per se, but that this loose and fast handling with data that is in no way anonymous indicates that the government and consultancies involved does not in any way understand or respect the concerns people have about privacy and the protection of personal information.
We don't want, e.g., a future where employers can look up our health issues and decide to get rid of someone they see as a potential liability, or use it to help manufacture justifications to get rid of someone who is troublesome. Or one where relatives of someone with a cancer diagnosis receives ads about hospice care, possibly before they've even been told. Or any number of other gross invasions of privacy that this data becoming easily available could enable.
> Google have more credibility (and money) to lose from a high publicity hack than government contractors
No, Google's (along with other major USA based firms) credibility flew out the window the minute E. Snowden released the NSA documents. I don't think that any corporation who has to manage sensitive information is going to trust Google or any other USA based company in the post-Snowden Era. The risks outweigh the benefits.
Except that we're now in the post-Snowden era, and companies like Google have taken measures to harden their networks against (among other things) GCHQ-esque intrusion.
In contrast, the other party in this story---the NHS---apparently hands out sensitive medical data on physical DVDs. I suppose on the plus side one doesn't need to worry about GCHQ being interested in illicitly acquiring that data, as if they have a relevant interest in it they can just ask their neighboring government agency.
While this was clearly an inappropriate act on the part of the contractor, it's not inappropriate for moving the data to a less secure medium or less credible institution than the origin.
What from the leaked documents tells you they lack credibility? From what I remember it was England's own GCHQ that was wiretapping the leased lines between Google data centers.
>What specifically are people actually afraid of with regard to this data set? I just don't get the regular public outcry about NHS data.
Well specifically it would be all the sensitive medial information which for some reason you omitted to mention in your comment. People are only talking about DOB and post codes because that information can be used to identify an individual and associate them with the medical records.
Apologies, I should have specified I meant on Googles servers.
The HES database contains attendence records. You only need a a single verified data point, such as a tabloid hack following you to the hospital one day, to remove pseudoanonymity. The debate over whether pseudoanonymised records or personalised records should be made available to organisations, in real terms, isn't distinct. You still only need one data point (an address, DOB etc) in the poorly pseudoanonymised set. Nothing really changes.
The implication seems to be the data is somehow less secure now its in Googles cloud, but that doesn't quite fit the reality of what we know about how data permeates through these incompetant organisations to begin with. The fact that PA had the data on DVD rather than disk is already an indication that they are a joke. Do you know of any prolific transparent encryption solutions for optical media? Most likely this data was in plaintext. If they carry the data around on unencrypted DVD what is the likelyhood that their own servers are secure, or at least more secure than Googles?
The bottom line is these records all exist and are necessary for the NHS to function, so a competant organisation may as well mine the data set. The issue, then, is that PA aren't competant, not that they use effective tools. Outrage is being misdirected.
No, there is plenty of justification for outrage all round. The NHS staff shouldn't have given the data to an untrustworthy organisation. That organisation shouldn't have given it to a data mining company under the jurisdiction of a foreign government. And that data mining company and foreign government will deserve similar outrage if they don't properly delete the illegally uploaded data as soon as possible after they are properly notified of the circumstances.
It wasn't necessary to share these records like this. You seem to be confusing access by clinicians, or at least legitimate medical researchers subject to similar medical ethics and confidentiality rules, with (as now alleged) just leaving it out there for literally anyone to find it.
Perhaps you aren't outraged by this, but I'll bet most people with a sensitive medical condition that might lead to unjustified discrimination would be. First they came for the HIV-positive, but I was not HIV-positive and I said nothing.
But it was a government contractor who uploaded and queried the data (PA), they just used Google's platform.
Frankly, this seems as related to Google as Nokia would be if someone used one of their cellphones to detonate an explosive. They're just the database provider.
The Google relevance is server location, if outside of UK and if outside EU various data protection laws at each level would appear to have been breached.
It's not relevant that it's Google. The pertinent information [to me] is that it's not a certified host for this confidential data; that the data has been sent outside of the UK; and to a lesser extent [for me] that the data is by virtue of the host it's been sent to legally and undetectably accessible by a foreign government.
> The extracted information will contain a person's NHS number, date of birth, postcode, ethnicity and gender.
Big woop? Your NHS# isn't used outside of the NHS or for anything of concern to most people, and your postcode (and address) is held on the unedited electoral roll by hundreds of organisations. Most people don't even opt-out of the edited register accessible for a small fee on 192.com
Why aren't us Brits worried about our credit histories and county court judgements being recorded and held by Equifax, an American company?
What specifically are people actually afraid of with regard to this data set sitting on Googles servers? I just don't get the regular public outcry about NHS data.