The health data of 500,000 UK Biobank volunteers was advertised for sale on the Chinese website Alibaba.
Health information belonging to 500,000 people in the United Kingdom has been stolen and offered for sale on the Chinese website Alibaba, the UK’s technology minister Ian Murray has confirmed.
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The medical data comes from participants of UK Biobank, the world's most comprehensive dataset of biological, health, and lifestyle information, compiled from volunteers and used by scientists across the world for research.
Murray said that on Monday, 20 April, the organisation informed the government that they had identified its data being advertised for sale by several sellers on Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms in China.
“Biobank told us that three listings that appear to sell UK Biobank participant data had been identified. At least one of these three datasets appears to contain data from all 500,000 UK Biobank volunteers,” Murray added.
According to the Biobank, the leaked data did not contain participants’ names, addresses, contact details, or telephone numbers.
“The government has spoken to the vendor today and they do not believe that there were any purchases from the 3 listings before they were taken down,” said Murray.
He added that the UK government had been in contact with the Chinese government and the vendor to ensure that the listings had been removed.
“I want to thank the Chinese government for the speed and seriousness with which they worked with us to help remove these listings and ongoing work to remove any further listings,”
Sir Rory Collins, chief executive and principal investigator of UK Biobank, apologised in a letter to the participants for the concern this incident has caused and assured them that personal identifying information remains safe and secure.
“In light of this incident, we are taking further steps to enhance our systems to prevent this from happening again,” Collins added.
He announced that the organisation has temporarily suspended all access to the UK Biobank research platform while it puts in place a strict limit on the size of files that can be downloaded from the platform.
