Medical data belonging to half a million British citizens has been offered for sale on a Chinese website following a security breach at health information database UK Biobank.
Technology minister Ian Murray said that data obtained from UK Biobank had been advertised for sale by several sellers on Alibaba e-commerce platforms in China, in what he called an “unacceptable abuse”.
UK Biobank, a non-profit charity, collects medical data provided by volunteers and shares it with researchers around the world to further medical research in cancer, heart disease and ways of predicting dementia.
The charity informed the UK government on Monday that it had identified anonymised data from its volunteers for sale by three sellers on Alibaba, including at least one listing that appeared to offer anonymised data from its 500,000 volunteers.
