UK health agency erroneously publishes doctors' personal details online
The body responsible for recruitment into Britain's National Health
Service, the NHS Medical Training Application Service or MTAS, has
mistakenly published the confidential personal details of junior
doctors on its website.
The breach of security was revealed by Channel 4, who report on their
website: "This is astonishing. Not only can we see what they wrote in
their applications; their addresses; their phone numbers; who their
referees are. We can also see if there were white, heterosexual, gay
Asian, Christian, Jewish or Hindu, and we can also see if they have
got police records and what the crime was."
The incident was widely reported in the UK (see websites of the BBC
here and here, as well as the Guardian and the Times), and it is
likely to add further to the troubles of a government keen to convince
its citizens that both the planned ID card and patients' medical
records databases will be safe.
For anyone interested in the political science perspective on the
issue of why the UK government has so much trouble with IT systems, I
recommend my colleague Helen Margetts' work, and especially her new
co-authored book on "Digital Era Governance".
Update: Channel 4 reports that there was a further security problem
with doctors' personal data. As of writing this, the MTAS website is
still offline "due to planned essential maintenance work"...
Technorati Tags: owl-content, politics, privacy
posted by Andreas @ 09:58 0 comments links to this post
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