As somebody who has "purchased" NHS Digital data, this author is trying very hard to make it sound like NHS Digital is selling data to private companies for commercial use.
The vast majority (if not all?) of NHS Digital's "sales" are to NHS organisations (getting back aggregated data on their own patients), research institutions, local councils or commercial companies contracted to provide services to one of the above.
The costs they charge are public, and from discussion with staff there seem to actually be roughly aligned with time taken to process and link, but are very high for a research project, on the order of £10k per extract if you need anything beyond cookie-cutter data.
If they were selling to commercial companies they would be charging way more, £10k is nothing to someone like Palantir.
Please don't just arbitrarily opt out of type 2 usage (now simply called the National opt-out). The UK has some of the best health surveillance (as in knowing why people are dying, not spying on people) in the world, but as the % of opt-outs creeps up the quality of our research goes down.
If I remember correctly, Cambridge Analytica got its data from an university researcher. So, I would say that people could be worried when the custody over their data becomes spread among people they don't know and can't hold accountable.
The researcher got their data from Facebook, who don't have the long and complicated application and vetting process that NHS Digital have.
NHS data has strong legal protection, and NHS Digital are really zealous on enforcing it, to the point where critical national projects can't access the data they need.
The vast majority (if not all?) of NHS Digital's "sales" are to NHS organisations (getting back aggregated data on their own patients), research institutions, local councils or commercial companies contracted to provide services to one of the above.
The costs they charge are public, and from discussion with staff there seem to actually be roughly aligned with time taken to process and link, but are very high for a research project, on the order of £10k per extract if you need anything beyond cookie-cutter data.
If they were selling to commercial companies they would be charging way more, £10k is nothing to someone like Palantir.
Please don't just arbitrarily opt out of type 2 usage (now simply called the National opt-out). The UK has some of the best health surveillance (as in knowing why people are dying, not spying on people) in the world, but as the % of opt-outs creeps up the quality of our research goes down.