A Chinese web site gives medical info of 500,000 volunteers from a UK database on the market | Society | EUROtoday

The medical knowledge, each genetic and physiological or well being habits, of half one million volunteers collected by UK Biobank have been put up on the market for a number of hours, earlier than being withdrawn, by a Chinese web site related to the web commerce large Alibaba.

“UK Biobank informed the Government [el pasado lunes] that their data had been put up for sale by several individuals through Alibaba’s network commerce platforms in China,” the Minister of Communications, Culture and Sport, Ian Murray, announced this week to the British House of Commons.

UK Biobank, an independent body that operates with private and public funding, has been carefully recording the medical data of half a million volunteers since 2006, aged between 40 and 69 when they joined the study.

The information obtained from volunteer participants is very complete, and includes imaging data, biomarkers, genetic data, medical histories, questionnaire responses, body measurements, as well as demographic, environmental, or lifestyle data.

Researchers from around the world can access UK Biobank information through a rigorous application process. Since this access began to be allowed in 2012, more than 18,000 papers (scientific research articles, in the terminology of the field) with information from this database have been published after peer review.

As reported by UK Biobank, the information that was put up for sale on the internet had been provided to three academic institutions, before it ended up on Alibaba’s platforms. The company, working with the Chinese and British governments, acted immediately to remove the data from the network.

The database ensures that the leaked data did not contain the personal identification of any of the volunteers, such as their names, addresses or telephone numbers.

The British Government claims to be convinced that, during the hours in which the data was online, no buyer acquired it.

Criticism of security

The messages of reassurance issued by the data bank itself by the British Government have failed to convince many academics and experts who had already expressed their concern about the numerous cybersecurity incidents that UK Biobank has suffered recently.

“It is the 198th episode in which Biobank data has been exposed on the Internet since last summer. It is not only that its information is put up for sale, but that it also remains within the reach of anyone who wants to download it today. Researchers, in the past, have repeatedly and accidentally uploaded databases to code-sharing platforms, and many of these files have then been replicated throughout the Internet,” reported Luc Rocher, associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute through the Science Media Center Rapid page. Reaction.

UK Biobank has explained, through a spokesperson, that researchers who access its data are required to work on “secure cloud-based platforms in the United Kingdom, to prioritize information security.”

However, the Government has asked the data bank to temporarily suspend its access to researchers until a technical solution is found to prevent a similar incident in the future.

“We have been assured that the inspiration will instantly perform a evaluate of its safety obstacles to entry its knowledge. In the brief time period, it’s going to droop downloads from its platform. Until there’s a new system that controls these downloads to researchers with prior approval,” Murray stated within the British Parliament.