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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

#31

Post by icebraining »

[deleted] wrote: post #29
ZoFreX wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to them, they got approval for doing that: > The alternative was to upload it to the cloud using tools such as Google Storage and use BigQuery to extract data from it. As PA has an existing relationship with Google, we pursued this route (with appropriate approval). This showed that it is possible to get even sensitive data in the cloud and apply proper safeguards.

[deleted]

They didn't say they had approval from Google. That wouldn't make much sense, you don't really need approval from Google to use BigQuery, you just need to open a Google account and create a new BigQuery project on their Developers Console

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

#32

Post by icebraining »

nly wrote: post #26

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…

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.

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

#33

Post by Sniperfish »

icebraining wrote: post #32
nly wrote: post #26

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…

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.

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

#34

Post by clienthunter »

Government privacy breaches are one of the things I despise most about current Western society. I am - day in, day out - one of those guys calling for ministerial blood.

However I have long thought that proper open access to health data could be as revolutionary as, say, antibiotics. The government can do whatever the hell they like with my data - on the condition that anyone else can too.

Can you imagine what insights could be gained with canonical graph schemas for individual (but (pseudo|a)nonymised) health records and a bit of statistics/ML? I think it would change the world, but it will never happen unless people like us get our hands on it. No amount of management consultants will innovate on the same scale as the tech community; saving lives through Github and AWS sounds like the only thing I'd do with my weekend.

On a side note, I think the same argument could be applied to a great many public services. I recently emailed my doctor a letter from one of my private doctors in PDF format for addition to my records. Can you guess what happened next? Yep, he printed it out and gave it to a secretary to scan it back in, because the Java app that manages this stuff has very tightly controlled boundaries. Shortly after that I overstayed on a trip to a different part of the UK and desperately needed a top-up of my meds. The solution? Print a prescription and mail it to the pharmacy by next-day post, because Scottish NHS and English NHS computers are incapable of communicating with each other. How long would it be after going open source before all this BS is obliterated? I'm thinking months.

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

#35

Post by icebraining »

touristtam wrote: post #27
swombat wrote: post #5

Surely PA Consulting should immediately be sued out of existence. This kind of behaviour must be considered beyond negligent, practically criminal. I would strongly support throwing anyone involved in this into jail for a long time as a deterrent against future criminals. This is just unbelievable.

Surely the people in power should have paid more attention to this before handing the data to a private third party. Those who ignored the problem before it emerged should not be allowed near position of decision for public office. Rant apart, this seriously raise the question of do we not need to have an alternative (maybe a pan European subsidized, not for profit organization) to Skynet (sorry I meant Google)?

Rant apart, this seriously raise the question of do we not need to have an alternative (maybe a pan European subsidized, not for profit organization) to Skynet (sorry I meant Google)?

The UK already has a program for accrediting and validating cloud providers (called G-Cloud[1]), that classifies services according to their suitability for storing confidential information, and of which Google is already excluded.

If this company used Google anyway, what makes you think they wouldn't have even if there was such organization in place?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Government_G-Cloud

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

#36

Post by anon1385 »

nly wrote: post #26

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…

>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.

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

#37

Post by atmosx »

ZoFreX wrote: post #28
swombat wrote: post #5

Surely PA Consulting should immediately be sued out of existence. This kind of behaviour must be considered beyond negligent, practically criminal. I would strongly support throwing anyone involved in this into jail for a long time as a deterrent against future criminals. This is just unbelievable.

According to them, they got approval for doing that: > The alternative was to upload it to the cloud using tools such as Google Storage and use BigQuery to extract data from it. As PA has an existing relationship with Google, we pursued this route (with appropriate approval). This showed that it is possible to get even sensitive data in the cloud and apply proper safeguards.

So apparently they don't have money to spend on building a secure, state-owned cloud storage service for patient records right?

I wonder, does the GCHQ use private cloud storage contractors or for spying material the government found money to create an appropriate database? :-)

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

#39

Post by collyw »

crb wrote: post #17

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.g…

I have begin collaborating in a rare diseases project.

So imagine you have one or two people in the country with certain symptoms. How anonymous is that?

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

#40

Post by collyw »

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...

This sounds all too like the project I am collaborating on. It will be moderately big data (a few terabytes at most). The guys developing it just now are on their third NoSQL database - Elasticsearch.

Them: "Look at how fast it is"

Me: "You only have 3GB of data in it"

Them: "Its so fast to develop, just connect Angular straight to Elasticsearch"

Me: "Absolutely no concern given to security"

Them: "The previous project used an SQL database and ended up having so many table"

Me: "So it was probably properly designed"

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