Further to the revelation that I am paranoid, Jonathan Freedland wades in on the matter of care.data – which I discussed a while back. Incidentally, I contacted our GP and the relevant markers have been attached to our records – under no circumstances is the information to be shared with anyone outside the practice except where necessary for our health care.
Freedland, however, in the rich totalitarian tradition of the Grauniad is in favour of the state flogging off our private and personal information to all and sundry – for that is what it will ultimately mean. He uses the canard that the information will be anonymised – cheerfully ignoring the fact that this will be a relatively easy matter to reverse engineer and that there will be enough markers in the information to identify individuals.
Nor even that there is an explicit declaration that this data will not be shared with insurance or marketing companies – so no prospect of a Strepsils ad popping up on your screen just after you’ve seen your GP over a sore throat.
At the moment. However, once the information is out there, we cannot know how a future government will act. Better, then, not to allow them the tools in the first place. And, no, the slippery slope is not a fallacy; we’ve seen it happen too many times now.
Rather, it’s the great gain that this information will provide. Small, clinical studies only tell you so much. Sometimes it’s mass data you need. It was mass information that disproved the link between MMR and autism, or that spotted the connection between Thalidomide and birth defects, or between smoking and cancer. Ethically you can’t conduct trials on pregnant women or children, so you’re reliant on knowing what’s happening in the population. If you can know that swiftly and at scale, you can act faster and more effectively. As the leaflet popping through the door puts it: “Better information means better care.”
Ah, yes, the end justifies the means, the greater good – the mantra chanted by the vile totalitarian socialist worldwide. All your data belongs to us, you are part of the collective and the collective is more important than the individual.
No it bloody well is not. My information is confidential between me and my GP and no fucker else. I really, really do not care about how many studies this might inconvenience. Some information is private and should stay that way. Unlike the sub-heading to the article, it is not my GP I mistrust, but the state and sinister creeps like Jonathan Freedland who think as he does, that because I live in this country, I am somehow a part of some collective and I owe this collective my personal and private information. I am not. I do not. I am an individual and intend to keep it that way. No one gets my confidential information for anything other than my direct healthcare. No exceptions. Freedland and his fellow communists can go fuck themselves.
As Nicola Perrin of the Wellcome Trust,which strongly backs care.data, put it to me: “If we want access to the best possible drugs, the drug companies need access to the best possible information.”
That does not include GP medical records, because it is none of their business. They are private. Mine will remain that way.
There is a principle at stake here too.
Indeed there is. Medical records come within the principle of doctor patient confidentiality.
In a subtle piece for the Socialist Health Association, Prof Dave Byrne recalls the traditional method of teaching medical students, in which a senior doctor on a ward-round would urge them to look at and learn from real-life individuals and their treatment: care.data is just a hi-tech version of that process, says Byrne, gathering together doctors’ experience of treating patients. Viewed this way, our individual experience of treatment – suitably anonymised – is not our private property, even if it should remain private. Those who treated us have the right to use that experience to benefit others, to help the collective good.
If that doesn’t send a chill down your spine to damned well should – there is such an organisation as the Socialist Health Association and, of course, that well-worn canard used to justify any abuse, “the common good”. Fuck the common good. It is my information and it will stay private. You will get it when you prize it from my cold, dead fingers you communist scum.
And, whether you have received the leaflet or not – get in touch with your GP and opt out. Do it now while there is still time.
“Ah, yes, the end justifies the means, the greater good – the mantra chanted by the vile totalitarian socialist worldwide.”
And of course, when they implement their schemes, it will turn out that “the end” bears little resemblance to what they claimed it would.
Which they’ll then use as the justification for even more meddling.
And don’t forget this is a government database. How long before your confidential information, or my confidential information is copied to a CD, DVD or USB stick and left in a taxi or on a train or in a Costa coffee shop? Government employees and contractors don’t have a particularly good record in keeping confidential what ought to be confidential.