Re:HMRC 'plans to share tax data with private firms'
by vertex-four on Saturday April 19, 2014 @01:16PM
(#7613979)
As it stands, we have the NHS having access to our personal data. What the Government wants to do is expand the number of organisations that have access to that data to include private companies that we have no oversight over. At least if the NHS has shit policy, we can complain and have our complaints heard. If a private company that has nothing to do with you has shit policy? Tough luck.
Additionally, there's many things that an organisation can do with data that are not in breach of data protection law,, but which I do not want them doing anyway, especially without me explicitly opting in to giving them that data. Data protection law mostly just says that they can't share it with other companies without your permission, they must let you know what it is if you ask, and you have the right to have it corrected if it's wrong. And even then, there's plenty enough companies in the UK that don't even meet those rules all the time!
This is not about individuals. This is about organisations.
On a pedantic note, the data was split by postcode district and age, with the average postcode district being 20,000 people. I still agree that's not data you'd want on a private insurers' database because they could de-anonymise outliers like the only 97 year old man, and others with partial knowledge of their hospital visit history, but it would be a lot of work making it usable for granting or denying insurance to particular individuals. Especially when it's probably easier to gain illicit access to the non-anonymised records than gain and make sense of illicit access to the anonymised records.