British Government proposes Orwellian scheme to connect up people's health records with data snooped from their social media use to nag them about their health
People's medical records will be combined with social and smartphone surveillance to predict who will pick up bad habits and stop them getting ill, under radical government proposals.
Matt Hancock, the health secretary, is planning a system of predictive prevention, in which algorithms will trawl data on individuals to send targeted health nags to those flagged as having propensities to health problems, such as taking up
smoking or becoming obese.
The creepy plans have already attracted privacy concerns among doctors and campaigners, who say that the project risks backfiring by scaring people or being seen to be abusing public trust in NHS handling of sensitive information.
As someone who has tracked technology and human rights over the past ten years, I am convinced that digital ID, writ large, poses one of the gravest risks to human rights of any technology that we have encountered. . By Brett Soloman
People's medical records will be combined with social and smartphone surveillance to predict who will pick up bad habits and stop them getting ill, under radical government proposals.
