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Personal Genome Project UK email disaster: If you can’t guarantee privacy, at least try to ensure trust

Posted on May 18, 2014 by Dissent

Paula Boddington writes:

It’s not often that you can write on a topic in ethics whilst rolling around laughing, so I shall take this rare opportunity to make a few comments on the ludicrous breach of privacy that occurred last night when the Personal Genome Project messed up something as simple as an email list.

[…]

So, knowing that there had seemingly been a large interest in taking part, I rushed to complete the initial online enrolment, hoping that I was going to be chosen. The next part of enrolling required reading through extensive documents and promised to take over an hour to complete, so at that stage I went to bed. Only to wake this morning to an email inbox chock full of hundreds of emails from other participants; the email list just copied and sent emails back to everybody who was trying to enrol. Some of these emails just gave the name of other participants, and for those who’d replied to the list, some email addresses were also visible.

Read more on Practical Ethics.

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