Governments forget at their peril that they must nowadays guard their citizens’ data as carefully as they guard their physical safety
This Editorial isn’t about research, and so definitely isn’t about human research ethics, but it highlights perfectly the need to safeguard confidentiality and the consequences of failing to meet community expectations.
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In 2015, the incoming director general, Maria Ågren, discovered that this work was to be outsourced to IBM. That was part of a wider pattern which has seen both the left and right of Swedish politics privatise large parts of the old welfare state this century. The law said this couldn’t happen unless IBM’s data handlers had all had security clearance. Her own department told her that couldn’t be done in time. So she decided to ignore the law. IBM, in turn, had the work done in Serbia and elsewhere in eastern Europe. Complaints about security from within the organisation – and, later, from the security police – were ignored. The defence minister and the interior minister knew in the spring of last year but could not find the time to tell the prime minister until January this year, when Ms Ågren was quietly sacked and, later, fined. The government hoped that any potential scandal would disappear along with her.
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