Tory plan to allow police and civil servants unrestricted access to your "confidential" medical records
* Do you really want other people poking around in your private medical history simply because you were a witness to a crime, or inadvertently associated with a criminal (bought their second hand car, fixed their computer, taught their kids languages or music, bought an item from them on eBay, chatted with them in a pub, whatever ...)?
* Do you want some police person or other employee of the state fishing through your intimate medical history, your mental health notes, your history of pregnancies, STDs, even whether you've been raped or had an abortion?
* Do you want people to be able to sift through this stuff without your permission, and without even the permission of a judge or your doctor?
* Do you want the possibility that some unscrupulous ex-copper or civil servant might try to blackmail you because yours happens to be amongst the batch of confidential records that they've pillaged?
* Do you want the possibility that bent coppers or dodgy civil servants could sell your (not even slightly anonymised) private medical data to whoever might be prepared to pay for it?
One particularly interesting aspect to this is that allowing unwarranted access to our confidential medical records would appear to be in direct contravention of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights which protects our right to privacy. There is even a ECHR judgement providing the precedent that warrantless fishing of people's private medical records is a breech of their right to privacy (Szuluk vs the United Kingdom -2009).
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