In an op-ed for the Guardian, Roger Taylor states why the closure of care.data is detrimental to the National Health Service and society. Care.data was an NHS initiative to “create a national dataset of patient information that could be shared with researchers.” Taylor believes the idea of privacy rights trumping data sharing benefits needs to be challenged, and the potential misuse of care.data is a small risk compared to the creation of new genomic and biomedical data sets. “They will, literally, contain within them the power of life and death,” said Taylor. “As things stand, there is a risk that this power will reside almost exclusively within the corporations and government agencies that hold this data. Without data sharing we are either blind to the impact of our social institutions or we give those who operate them a monopoly control over the public narrative about their benefits.”
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