Tuesday, 4 August 2026 — medConfidential
DCMS under the new PM can see things differently
The new Government has inherited an open consultation on allowing data brokers to be ever more creepy, to buy and sell more data with less regulation. It’s coated in the language of helping individuals, but the focus is giving data brokers more permission to sell data about you, and giving you less say in the process.
The consultation assumes data must be copied to be useful, but on-device AI makes copying unnecessary, so DSIT was envisaging a world that’s already ending.
The consultation isn’t about consent – all the positive use cases discussed are things that are already legal today; it’s about allowing data flows in all aspects of your life that you wouldn’t say yes to if they had to ask you. DSIT internalised that when the law says you should be able to see data about you, they know Government, the NHS, and the private sector just ignore that because it’s convenient to keep data subjects as literal subjects of decisions made by others.
Data policy in DSIT was broken by tech advances, at the same time as those capabilities were distributed wider (not just to those who can get a meeting with officials).
You can already make some choices to use data. Your device tomorrow will give you more choices than today.
Read more about the consultation at medConfidential.org
medConfidential defends the confidentiality you desire for your medical records.
(We have details on the single care record proposal and how to use your opt outs)
Every use of data should be consensual, safe, and transparent. In matters of health and care, your relationship with your doctor is based on a very human spirit of confidentiality. Not the cold law of data protection.
The single care record will be a government/politician controlled database of every interaction you have with the health service, and all the text notes your doctor has ever typed; why you are taking anti-depressants, why you need sleeping pills, STD treatments or prevention drugs, and why you were being given them. All will be centrally stored, available to staff wherever you see the NHS logo, from any A&E in the country to any GP, hospital, Pharmacy, or private health provider able to read all of it. You’ll have no way to know who has read the things you told your doctor at your most vulnerable time in your life. These notes last for your lifetime. How existing opt outs will translate, and whether the national data opt out will apply when the Government sells the database is also currently unknown.
Any large, formal system is bound to breach the Hippocratic Oath; “First, do no harm”. Data doesn’t care. In a purely digital world, a thing either is or it isn’t – with no nuance. Smaller systems, talking to each other, offer more discretion for the humanity of your situation.
Patients routinely find themselves in one of the following three real-world scenarios. Human situations get ignored by the database designers’ visions, forgetting the real world:
- When a doctor cannot tell their patient the full story without causing distress – such as when at test returns a likely false positive result.
- When a doctor cannot tell another doctor something – such as where they’ve been asked not to by their patient.
- When institutions cannot tell doctors relevant details – e.g. in situations where there is “too much data, but no clear information”.
When you are between diagnosis and treatment, which (if any) of these three apply may change hour-to-hour. Human choices are a reality, usually ignored by by those who want to copy records across a lifetime.
medConfidential defends the confidentiality you desire for your medical records.
The New Dark Age 
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