Nudging Consent & the New Opt-Out System to the Processing of Health Data in England

Publikation: Bidrag til bog/antologi/rapportBidrag til bog/antologiForskningfagfællebedømt

This chapter examines the challenges of the revised opt-out system and the secondary use of health data in England. The analysis of this data could be very valuable for science and medical treatment as well as for the discovery of new drugs. For this reason, the UK government established the “care.data program” in 2013. The aim of the project was to build a central nationwide database for research and policy planning. However, the processing of personal data was planned without proper public engagement. Research has suggested that IT companies – such as in the Google DeepMind deal case – had access to other kinds of sensitive data and failed to comply with data protection law. Since May 2018, the government has launched the “national data opt-out” (ND opt-out) system with the hope of regaining public trust. Nevertheless, there are no evidence of significant changes in the ND opt-out, compared to the previous opt-out system. Neither in the use of secondary data, nor in the choices that patients can make. The only notorious difference seems to be in the way that these options are communicated and framed to the patients. Most importantly, according to the new ND opt-out, the type-1 opt-out option – which is the only choice that truly stops data from being shared outside direct care – will be removed in 2020. According to the Behavioral Law and Economics literature (Nudge Theory), default rules – such as the revised opt-out system in England – are very powerful, because people tend to stick to the default choices made readily available to them. The crucial question analyzed in this chapter is whether it is desirable for the UK government to stop promoting the type-1 opt-outs, and whether this could be seen as a kind of “hard paternalism.”
OriginalsprogEngelsk
TitelLegal Tech and the New Sharing Economy
RedaktørerMarcelo Corrales Compagnucci, Nikolaus Forgó, Toshiyuki Kono, Shinto Teramoto, Erik Vermeulen
Antal sider22
UdgivelsesstedSingapore
ForlagSpringer
Publikationsdato2020
Sider61-82
Kapitel5
ISBN (Trykt)9789811513497
ISBN (Elektronisk)9789811513503
DOI
StatusUdgivet - 2020
NavnPerspectives in Law, Business and Innovation
ISSN2520-1875

ID: 228362016