Stephen Adams writes in the Daily Telegraph:

A national DNA database is needed if the NHS is to capitalise on advances in technology and offer personalised medicine to all in the future, advisors have told the Government.

At the moment the health service is just starting to offer patients genetic testing, for example to tell if they will respond to certain cancer fighting drugs.

But in the future the technology is likely to be central to many areas of healthcare – from testing pregnant women’s blood to check the foetus’s risk of Down’s syndrome, to tracking disease outbreaks.

Sir John Bell, chair of the Human Genomics Strategy Group, said to deliver ‘genomic’ based medicine in the future, a national database was necessary.

Speaking yesterday (Wednesday) to launch a report by the group to make this happen, he said: “It’s almost impossible to go forward with the whole personalised medicine agenda, unless you have this database.”

The report, “Building on our inheritance – Genomic technology in healthcare”, includes this recommendation:

DH in partnership with BIS and other relevant partners should develop proposals to establish a central repository for storing genomic and genetic data, and relevant phenotypic data from patients, with the capacity to provide biomedical informatics services and an open-data platform that small and medium-sized enterprises can build upon.

Lori MacVittie writes at ZDnet:

The term big data has come to mean big headaches for IT organisations and big problems for consumers. Privacy is a growing concern as more and more data is not only collected but voluntarily shared by consumers in exchange for free access to applications and functionality.

Those wondering how much sites such as Facebook might know about them have to jump through hoops to find out and are likely to be surprised by how many personal details websites actually store.

The TV documentary Erasing David, screened on More 4 in 2010, detailed an attempt by film maker David Bond to do just that — find out how private his identity really is. After deliberately disappearing for a month, he hired detectives to track him down.

Before his disappearing act, Bond spent weeks trying to find out just how much information various websites held on him. Big data took on a whole new meaning as he sat at a desk, poring over more than 1,000 printed pages from Facebook alone.

The UK government is proposing to make part of that discovery process easier on the consumer and their wallets with its Midata initiative, whereby consumers would have access to some of their data held by private organisations.

The government is promising protocols to handle privacy or consumer protection issues — but also stresses that this is a private-sector initiative and it will not be hamstrung by rules and regulations.

For anyone who hasn’t yet seen it, the thought-provoking film “Erasing David” is now available on DVD.

According to Information Age:

Eight employees of Essex Police, including three police officers, have resigned after allegedly accessing the personal records of citizens contained in the Police National Computer.

One of the officers and a community support officer face criminal charges of gross misconduct for illegally accessing and sharing the data.

Essex Police analysed the data access histories of all 5,500 of its employees after it emerged that confidential data had been shared with the public, the East Anglian Daily Times reported yesterday.

Andrew Orlowski writes at The Register:

So-called ’smart meters’ are under renewed attack – this time from MPs and Which? magazine, which has recommended a halt to the programme.

Later in the week the Public Accounts Committee is expected to be critical of the ambitious scheme, which comes at a high (£11bn+) cost to consumers, and which critics say is based on shaky maths.

Labour leader Ed Miliband ordered the programme as one of his final gifts to the nation as Energy Secretary. It involves replacing all 53 million gas and electricity meters at UK homes and businesses. The new wireless devices, which call home, are touted as an environmental benefit.

But their sole advantage is strategic: they provide power companies with a remote ‘kill switch’ to the home. The Climate Change Committee report of a year ago noted that: “Meters will allow supply to be controlled remotely.” And don’t imagine this is some unfounded scaremongering: it’s official.

He concludes:

So here we are, and it looks very much like the ID Card scheme all over again: a vast top-down technocratic exercise based on dubious cost estimates. Alas, when the Coalition took power, it vowed to accelerate the programme, rather than scrap it. But it’s fortunate so far, in that the only significant public opposition to smart meters worldwide has come from the tinfoil hat brigade, fretting about ‘electrosmog’. Isn’t freezing the poor to death a rather stronger argument against them?

Dmitri Prieto writes on the Havana Times web site, comparing his experiences of living in London and Havana:

What recently happened to my friend Mario Castillo, who was arrested and fined here in Cuba for not carrying his ID, reminded me of my experiences in Great Britain.

When I went to that country for a year to study for a master’s degree in anthropology, I knew that within three days of my arrival I was required to register with the police. It turned out that I had to register not at just any police station, but at a kind of special center where they produced the documents for resident foreigners.

After going through a long line, I was interviewed by an officer who took a picture with a digital camera and, in almost the same instant, handed me my A4-formatted document. On it appeared my origin, my home address, the photo and a few other bits of data. The paper, which was in such an exotic format for personal identification, was nothing more than an “identity card” for foreign residents.

What immediately came to my mind was how complicated it was going to be for me to get around London with such a “personal card.”

Yet that same form/ID specified very clearly that if the police ever questioned me, I wasn’t obligated to show them that A4 form; rather, I only had to go to the nearest police station with it within 48 hours. In other words, not having it on me implied no problem at all.

In London, for practical purposes, we would use a student ID, a monthly bus pass or other similar documents as identification.

Needless to say, it doesn’t work that way in Cuba. Everybody has to carry their ID card here.