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NHS England patient data 'uploaded to Google servers', Tory MP says

theguardian.com

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Re: NHS England patient data 'uploaded to Google servers', Tory MP says

#11

Post by sailfast »

timthorn wrote: post #3

The report in question (linked in the article) provides "exceptional" evidence for the performance of Cloud technology by comparing a Google BigQuery search against an on-premises SQL Server query. So, cloud is good because map-reduce performs better than relational databases...

The report also indicates that appropriate government approvals were obtained and that they protected the healthcare data appropriately. Might they have been using an appropriately secured Google cloud tool? I understand that this still doesn't tell you the country in which the data resides, but that's a lot different than posting data on the open internet or an unsecured cloud instance.

Re: NHS England patient data 'uploaded to Google servers', Tory MP says

#13

Post by k-mcgrady »

Why does the government repeatedly hire incompetent people?? They pay crazy amounts of money for it too.

I hope there is a very public investigation into this. We are losing privacy every day now and this is one area of our lives that needs to remain private at all costs. There is very little I can see to gain and lots to lose from losing privacy in health. Especially in a public system like the NHS.

Re: NHS England patient data 'uploaded to Google servers', Tory MP says

#15

Post by nly »

kabdib wrote: post #12

27 DVDs = not a lot of data. What were they doing, transcoding through paper tape?

> The data set was so large it took up 27 DVDs and took a couple of weeks to upload.

27 * 8 GiB (DVD-9) / 2 weeks = ~1.5 Mbps. Yep, that's British broadband bought from the lowest bidder.

Re: NHS England patient data 'uploaded to Google servers', Tory MP says

#16

Post by noir_lord »

I've very carefully opted out of every single program that the NHS has created for digital records going back years.

Whether that has done any good I have no idea but I do have signed letters from all relevant organisations (Doctors surgery) saying that I've opted out.

This does have legal battle written all over it.

Re: NHS England patient data 'uploaded to Google servers', Tory MP says

#17

Post by crb »

This is the data in question: http://www.hscic.gov.uk/hes

It is anonymised [1], publicly licensable data.

Here are a list of users and uses. [2]

[1] "We apply a strict statistical disclosure control in accordance with the HES protocol, to all published HES data. This suppresses small numbers to stop people identifying themselves and others, to ensure that patient confidentiality is maintained."

[2] http://www.hscic.gov.uk/media/10495/Users-and-uses-of-HES/pd...

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