The British government is looking into in case of health records of citizens listed for sale on China’s Alibaba e-commerce platform.
The particular health data in question is from a health charity called Biobank, and it includes information from 500,000 British citizens.
British Science Minister Ian Murray told legislators that Biobank had notified the government on Monday that multiple merchants on Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms appeared to have listed its data for sale in three separate listings.
UK Biobank is a health research foundation that gives qualified researchers anonymised data.
According to Murray, the data from its 500,000 participants did not include their names, addresses, phone numbers or contact information.
”The government has spoken to the vendor and they do not believe that there were any purchases from the three listings before they were taken down,” Murray stated.
He continued by saying that the charity had denied access to three research institutions that were identified as the source of the data, and that the government had collaborated with UK Biobank, the Chinese government and the vendor to delete the entries.
UK Biobank stated that it would conduct a thorough board-led inquiry into the occurrence and characterised it as a blatant violation of contractual commitments in a statement posted on its website.
In order to limit the number of data that can be exported and to keep an eye on downloads for questionable activities, the charity announced that it has temporarily banned all access to its research platform.
UK Biobank stated that there was no indication of participants being identified against their permission and that the data in question did not contain personally identifying information.
The government took the issue “extremely seriously” according to Murray, who called the occurrence an unacceptable abuse of UK Biobank’s data and stated that the charity had submitted itself to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
