On a Tuesday in mid-April, the UK Biobank ' one of the largest and most comprehensive health-tracking studies in the world ' received a troubling e-mail from an anonymous researcher. The sender had discovered what appeared to be sensitive information from hundreds of thousands of the study's participants for sale on Xianyu, an e-commerce website owned by the Chinese technology company Alibaba. With the help of Alibaba and the governments of the United Kingdom and China, the UK Biobank managed to get the listing removed. Still, the incident raised concerns about data security, spurred an internal investigation and led the biobank to cut off access for researchers while it built new infrastructure to secure its data. After nearly five months offline, the biobank has said it will begin to re-open to researchers this month. The UK Biobank contains genetic information and troves of other biomedical data, including medical-imaging files, health history and lifestyle information, from...
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