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I had a discussion with a mate who worked for the NHS re: this. She was convinced that it would be anonymous so would be fine.
I suggested that to be useful for studies the data had to contain a lot of fields, once you start combining the fields you are very quickly narrowing down the subject, without those fields it would be difficult to use the data.
In short, the data is very useful but the anonymity is worth shit so you have to be very trusting in who it is being sold to.
aggi
@bq
One of the things that releasing anonymised health data to 3rd parties has permitted is the application of large scale number crunching algorithms, previously used to detect fraud patterns, on that data. This has successfully mapped and predicted outbreaks of various diseases around the country, allowing drugs and other treatments to be allocated much more effectively, and preventing outbreaks from becoming epidemics.
Sometimes selling data can be a good thing.