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"De-anonymising data is surprisingly easy: if you know Tony Blair’s date of birth (a matter of public record) and the two dates during his term in office in which he was treated for a heart condition (ditto), you can pick him out of any “anonymised” pool of NHS data in seconds, and then discover all those facts about his health that aren’t a matter of public record... Dr Ben Goldacre and his team at Oxford created OpenSAFELY, a “Trusted Research Environment” that allows researchers to write programs that analyse NHS data in situ. These programs would be dispatched to run against the data held by NHS trusts, and then the system would return the results to the researchers without ever letting them handle the data – which never left the trusts’ own servers."
https://goodlawproject.org/cory-doctorow-health-data-it-isnt-just-palantir-or-bust/
#dataProtection #research #NHS #privacy

PS #Palantir, ... is literally named after an evil, all-seeing magic talisman employed by the principal villain of Lord of the Rings (“Sauron, are we the baddies?”)