On Data Brokers and Data Intermediaries

DSIT is running two separate consultations on data brokers and data intermediaries, as if they are different things (but the consultations need submission to each, hence this blog post). They didn’t publish the consultation questions (which might raise questions about the viability of the consultation?), so we have.

Health data has a long experience of data brokers and intermediaries – the main difference is they’re an intermediary if they’re selling your data and only a broker when someone’s buying it.

All brokers and intermediaries die.

Whether disrupted by technology, by competition, by regulation, by unlawful behaviours, or simply the world changed around them. Usually though, it’s greed. The same greed that destroyed the supposed good intentions of the building societies by turning them into banks and then turning them into smoking holes of financial ruin.

The first movers are usually fraudsters and crooks, because they don’t need to make an assessment of a legitimate business. The second wave are the opportunists – the most eager adoptees of “OpenBanking” are the companies servicing landlords who compete to use the most features of the process to let landlords creep on their tenants up to 6 months after the financial checks are done.

23andMe was the future once, and now it too is basically bankrupt. The business took the DNA of people at the highest levels from US tech and government networks, and anyone else who believed their promises, and is now selling itself for whatever money it can get (and there’s a big argument over what that is), prompting a Biden Executive Order that the data couldn’t be sold to China. UKBiobank wants the cash.

UKBiobank was the future once, and then their managers realised it was at risk from “Our Future Health” and so opened data up to anyone who filled in their 3 page form, which included eugenecists operating out of the same office as the Human Diversity Foundation and Qanon conspiracy theory front companies. Biobank insists they check the names of applicants against known eugenicists, but it seems they don’t check the address…

Our Future Health will degrade the same way. They’re currently spending millions on building their service, only to find that their tests don’t work and have had to be hidden from view of their members who joined to see the results (although OFH will still flog access to the data).

If you read the annex of the Department of Health in England’s “Request for Information” from suppliers for Mr Streeting’s politically controlled “single care record”, you’ll see that all the analyses OFH promises in future on up to 1 million people can be done at far greater scale using NHS data. OFH is reasonably proud that it has seen 1 million people ever, which NHS General Practice sees in a day. Even Genomics England is getting harassed by the Department of Health in England who wants to load all the genomic data of every person in the country into Palantir, and track genetic traits through generations.

The £600m for the proposed HDRUK-Service for NHS data purposes to make data more accessible to creeps and brokers, copied out on the politically controlled central health record, but those plans are incoherent (which we’ll address in a subsequent post – there are a great many moving parts on data in government at this moment in time, and they’re not internally consistent let alone consistent with each other).

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On Data Brokers and Data Intermediaries