The Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has put the health and lifestyle data of Danes up for sale on the open market with a nice and attractive promotional video:
"When the right people are paired with the right data, life-changing discoveries can arise. That's why Danish health data is the obvious choice for ambitious innovators.
Our data covers a life span from cradle to grave. Thanks to the Danish personal register, founded in 1968, every Dane has a unique personal identification number, and this number can be used to connect data across registers and databases. This means that the registers can be combined in a multitude of ways, and that means that we have a wealth of epidemiological data in both time and place.
Our more than 150 available registers contain a large variety of data, including biological, DNA, and socio-economic data. And our unique eco-system surrounding the data includes a cooperative invironment of researchers, and high security standards enables data anlysis without data leaving the country.”
Anne Bloch Thomsen, Medical Director of Pfizer, Denmark:
“Danish healthcare data are unique because of their very high quality, and this is enabled by high ethical standards, and also very high levels of trust in data security among Danes”
Narrator:
“The quality of Danish health data is unbeatable thanks to the high degree of digitalization in Denmark. Since the 1970s data have been collected systematically across sectors in the Danish healthcare system.”
Professor Preben Bo Mortensen, iPSYCH, University of Aarhus:
If we had not had access to these amazing data, our study would have been much smaller, much more expensive, much less representative, and all together much less informative.”
Narrator continues:
Paired with the right innovators, Danish health care data truly holds the possibilities of creating better, healthier and longer lives. That’s why we call it: “Data for Life!””
Signed by:
Danish Health Data Authority
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark
Everything for the industry. A brilliant offer for the innovative investor. A nice little side business and income source for the State of Denmark.
They get to study everything about you and me, from our health history to our lifestyle to our DNA. They know us better than we know yourselves.
But don't worry, you remain completely anonymous, your entire life has been reduced to a simple faceless number among numbers. A number that holds thousands of pieces of valuable information for those number wizards who seize the opportunity to buy the magical keys to decode it, and make a flowering business out of it.
The state has turned you and me into a commodity among commodities on the free market. So that more goods can be sold specifically for you and me. So that new medicines can be invented and applied to specific audiences. All for the benefit of the health and longevity of humanity.
Apparently, this is how the state sees us as citizens. We are no longer free individuals with ownership of our own body, health and life history, the electorate who selects members of government to serve our best interest, but a quantified commodity whose data the state is free to extract, stock and resell at the right price.
The state knows everything about us. So what you or I tell our doctor in confidence, what our blood and tissue samples contain, the composition of our DNA, our criminal record, our socio-economic status and career history, and how our whole life has developed, measured on more than 150 different registers - now Pfizer and all the other nice and innovative health business people all over the world know that too.
That is, if they are willing to pay the modest cost of all this glorious confidential information.
Ethical concerns? What could they possibly be?
We are the state, who owns the people. We don't ask anyone for permission!
I certainly don't remember giving my consent.
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The video has recently been taken down from Youtube, but the data is still for sale.
A copy may be viewed here: