The Motley Coat of Data

By Leslie Stevens

As a lawyer I am accustomed to, but sceptical of, hard and fast categories – we know all too well that bright line rules and seemingly fixed categories raise more questions than they provide answers. In data protection several such categories exist: anonymous data and personal data, sensitive personal data and ordinary personal data, data controller and data processor and so forth. Given the current reform of data protection law in Europe, and the anticipated introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation circa 2016/2017, questions should be (and have been) raised as to the effectiveness of these categories as regulatory tools. The lines between anonymous data and personal data have been blurred – the ease with which data may be re-identified and the power of data linkage has revealed the fallacy that is truly ‘anonymous’ data. Ordinary personal data, once considered innocuous, when combined with any countless array of other data, are likely to reveal intimate details about people’s lives – far more sensitive than data protection law would recognise.

Broadening the Medical Ethics Perspective Through Dance

By Shawn Harmon

Answers Too Easily Attained?
One of the fundamental questions that is asked through the field of ethics is: ‘How should we live?’ This question must also be central to medical ethics, or ‘bioethics’. However, we seem to believe that we have answered this question, and we have settled into a comfortable application of that answer across a range of clinical circumstances and technological deployments:

  We should live independently and autonomously, without coercion or interference, with few imposed duties and little sense of obligation, free to avoid risk and to vigorously protect our physical and emotional integrity against state organs, private entities, and individuals. 

While this is an oversimplification, the majority of substantive assessments will either explicitly or implicitly begin from a foundational proposition not far removed. The premise is not generally objectionable, but the lack of depth in our ethical reflexivity is disheartening. How have we embedded this premise so deeply that we proceed from it in most every medical and research encounter?