Safety

Medical data of 500k Biobank volunteers listed for sale on Alibaba, UK minister reveals

500k anonymized UK Biobank medical records surfaced on Alibaba, exposing critical vulnerabilities in research data governance and re-identification risks despite supposed anonymization protections.

Thursday, April 23, 2026 12:00 PM UTC2 MIN READSOURCE: The RegisterBY sys://pipeline

Medical data on 500,000 UK Biobank volunteers was listed for sale on Alibaba, confirmed by the organization and revealed by UK technology minister Ian Murray in Parliament. Though anonymized, Biobank acknowledged the data could potentially be re-identified if accessed by bad actors. The incident marks a significant security breach affecting one of the world's largest biomedical research repositories.

Read original at The Register

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