Home Office refuses to enforce privacy code on NHS staff using video

The government has rejected a request by the surveillance camera watchdog to allow it to monitor the increasing and unregulated use of body-worn video cameras in hospitals.

The cameras, which record sound as well as images, are being increasingly deployed in hospitals in an effort to tackle abuse of frontline health service staff.

On Wednesday, it emerged that surveillance camera commissioner Tony Porter had warned ministers last year that the privacy of millions of NHS patients was put at risk by the unchecked use of the cameras.

In a call backed by privacy campaigners, Porter recommended adding NHS trusts to a list of public bodies required to comply with a code of practice on the use of surveillance in effort to promote greater transparency and accountability.

Now the Home Office, the department to which Porter reports, has rejected the requests.

A letter to Porter sent last week from the home office minister, Brandon Lewis, and released by the government on Wednesday, said the recommendation was unnecessary as: “We had not exhausted the possibilities of increasing voluntary compliance.”

In letter in November, also released on Wednesday, Porter warned that the voluntary approach had twice been rejected by NHS Protect, the body responsible for hospital security, “on the ground that they could not enforce compliance”.

Porter’s letter added: “Despite our best attempts, voluntary adoption has not worked … and it will difficult without government intervention.”

Under the code, which is overseen by Porter as the surveillance camera commissioner, public bodies such as the police must demonstrate a “pressing need” for the use of surveillance cameras, and warn the public of their use and how images will be stored and used. Porter, a former senior counter-terrorism officer, has been working with the police to ensure how public privacy can be protected as forces roll out body-worn video for frontline officers. He wants to do the same in the NHS.

In his November letter, Porter warned Lewis that he was becoming increasingly concerned about the use of surveillance in the NHS.

He said: “The NHS trusts are complex organisations that use surveillance camera systems in public areas where people under surveillance are likely to be vulnerable and distressed, and where the privacy requirements and burden on those conducting transparent, legitimate and proportionate surveillance is surely at its highest.”

It pointed out that millions of people use hospitals each year, and added: “The introduction of body-worn video cameras at several hospitals has increased my concerns. Body-worn video cameras are a particularly intrusive device as they capture audio and video simultaneously without the option of switching either off whilst recording.”

Porter said the government’s decision to allow surveillance to go unchecked in the NHS raised a series of questions about the privacy of patients.

In a statement to the Guardian, he said: “Surveillance cameras play an important role in maintaining public and staff safety, preventing and resolving crimes. Yet in the healthcare sector they are not subject to scrutiny and standards, and therefore can we be reassured that they are fit for purpose and are doing what they are meant to be doing?

“Are we sure that security officers using body-worn video are doing so without invading an individual’s right to privacy when they may be at their most vulnerable? NHS Protect have twice rejected recommending that trusts adopt the surveillance camera code of practice as it’s not mandatory for them – the code is designed to ensure cameras are used effectively, transparently and efficiently to protect individuals’ freedoms.

“In the absence of any mandate to adopt the code, I’m continuing to work with government to look at how we can encourage NHS trusts and hospitals to voluntarily adopt the surveillance camera code of practice.”

Daniel Nesbitt, research director at Big Brother Watch, urged ministers to heed Porter’s warning.

He said: “The government shouldn’t be standing in the way of effective oversight. The NHS controls a large number of CCTV cameras and the public have to be able to trust they will use them properly.

“Giving the surveillance camera commissioner the power to oversee how trusts use their cameras should be a no-brainer.”

Home Office refuses to enforce privacy code on NHS staff using video

Privacy can be a burden sharing a lot more on the web may well help

‘Social media posts tend in the direction of the small but humorous gripe … possibly we are afraid of seeming weak’. Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Photos

I have been possessing some private issues. A vindictive stalker has manufactured me 2nd-guess my every word and action stress and misunderstanding have sometimes strained my partnership with my partner. Coping with these concerns, on prime of the everyday strains of becoming a sex employee in this economy, I have identified that my kettle occasionally boils over and I truly feel the require to blow off steam, to vent.

Sadly, the era of venting could have passed me by. At university my crowd was a close-knit assortment of misfits none of us was quite stable and our drug and experimental sex habits did not support. We endlessly dissected our frustrations and passions. These days, I have several great, supportive buddies, but we seldom confide in every single other. Perhaps we acknowledge that every person has concerns and we shouldn’t burden any individual with our own.

On social media my friends’ posts have a tendency in the direction of the minor but humorous gripe. One particular may well complain of pressure or sleeplessness, but simple mentions of significant troubles are unusual. Maybe we avoid posting them because we are afraid of seeming weak, of currently being attacked, or of causing harm to ourselves and to other folks by way of our honesty. Alternatively we submit vague updates, indirectly encouraging support from trusted friends.

This tendency to hide our distress affords us a lot of social rewards. Conceivably, it forms component of the national bedrock of civility that welcomed and delighted me as a new immigrant. It truly is also crucial to bear in mind that our really like of privacy has fuelled our righteous outrage at state surveillance of our calls and emails. Nevertheless, we pay heavy costs for our social privacy. We risk soldiering on as our relationships disintegrate, as we search for operate, or as we struggle to make ends meet.

I have a youthful good friend who will demonstrate up vibrant and cheerful for a social engagement making an attempt to hide the fact she is weak with hunger. To directly offer her my assistance would embarrass her she was raised to discover it shameful to request for help. Empathy alone couldn’t conquer her embarrassment. What last but not least received through was an understanding that the recession, not individual failure, was the principal cause of her joblessness.

So a lot of of our private worries are really issues of public import. My younger friend’s hunger and my travails in organization can each be blamed on our age of heartless austerity. So can the anguish of a disabled particular person forced to select amongst inappropriate operate assignments and destitution. So also can the terror of a transgendered individual forced to live closeted in purchase to compete at perform or to steer clear of violence and rejection. Our struggles seem shameful only when contemplated in isolation finding out that we dwell in a brutal, exploitative technique we put them in context and find, happily, that we are not alone.

There are glimmers of a various strategy. A few weeks in the past, I observed on Facebook that my buddy, an inspiring female who lives with bipolar disorder, had broadened her day-to-day choice of uplifting memes to contain sombre, arresting descriptions of the pain and loneliness felt by a particular person struggling a depressive episode. I asked her what had moved her to open up in this way. She explained that her posts had encouraged her pals to open up about their personal struggles in posting about the darkness of depression she could acknowledge and help people still submerged in its depths. In his magnificent Walden, Henry David Thoreau famously said: “The mass of males lead lives of quiet desperation.” To lift ourselves out of desperation could get generations till then, lets voice our despairs and find ourselves, and every single other, via the typical themes of our laments.

Privacy can be a burden sharing a lot more on the web may well help

EdTech, Student Privacy, As well A lot Testing? Q&A With The Department Of Education

Jordan: I have to inquire a question about video games. I’m a big fan of game-based mostly learning. I’ve observed, just watching my personal children, how strong video games can be as an instructional strategy. Obviously, video games are not the magic resolution to every little thing, but they are a single powerful tool that teachers can commence to add to their toolboxes. But there are a good deal of barriers to classroom implementation. The most significant barrier has to do with resources and access to technology. But even in colleges where assets are not in the way of adopting game-based mostly studying answers, there’s usually inadequate specialist advancement for teachers. Or, in schools that do have ample technological resources, teachers discover that college students don’t have ample entry to engineering at property to make introducing game primarily based studying profitable.

What other obstacles to implementing game primarily based studying or educational technologies do you see? And how does the Division of Training perform a element in eliminating those obstacles?

Shelton: I as well am a large fan of properly-designed studying video games as one particular of many resources for understanding and teaching. I consider there are 3 other huge barriers to broad adoption in classrooms. The initial is the hardest – the cultural stigma that men and women have to get in excess of that taking part in a game is wasting time.

The 2nd is that in addition to education for teachers on how to integrate game based mostly understanding we need to have much more and better resources that make game integration less complicated and much more seamless and make the information a lot more accessible. We have to make it less difficult and more beneficial for teachers to embed video games in their instructional toolkit and every day routines.

Ultimately, with a couple of notable exceptions, educational games as a group want to be greater developed and clearer about what they are excellent for and what they are not developed to do. While educational games utility is unclear, teachers are generating a rational choice to invest their time in other strategies. But when a case can be created that the games will make a difference, I consider items will open up pretty swiftly. An innovator named Zoran Popovic worked with a effectively-created studying game to integrate adapative algorithms to improve its efficiency. They then partnered with schools and districts to launch Algebra Challenges that resulted in college students from many backgrounds solving literally millions of algebra issues and mastering crucial ideas.

The far more examples we have like that the a lot more speedily we’ll see broad adoption of learning video games in classrooms.

Jordan: The recent buzzwords in training are plentiful: teacher accountability, formative and substantive assessment, the widespread core, data-driven instruction, 1-to-a single technology adoption, character training. I’ve been an outspoken critic of these buzzwords, arguing that they obfuscate the concerns a lot more than they open a room for genuine conversation. In distinct, I’ve written extensively about the issues with buzzwords like “grit, perseverance, and optimism.” Lucky for us, the conversation about education is often evolving. The words we hear these days will be replaced with new words.

I’m curious how you feel the conversation will adjust in the many years to come? Which buzzwords will drift away and which will become more predominant? And in the political sphere, what educational problems will have a principal place in the 2016 presidential election season?

Shelton: I have no concept what the next round of buzzwords will be, and whilst some of the terms like grit, persistence and resilience have become faddish, there is critical science and a fair quantity of common sense behind them.

EdTech, Student Privacy, As well A lot Testing? Q&A With The Department Of Education

NHS admits new health-related information database could pose privacy threat

Health researchers and personal companies will be in a position to access information from the information if they can demonstrate it will advantage patient care or enable more scientific advances.

Nevertheless, there has been a developing backlash towards the scheme with family members medical professionals and privacy campaigners raising fears that data could be misused. On Sunday night patients’ and privacy groups stated the analysis document, which specifics a host of likely dangers, “confirms some of our worst fears”.

NHS officials have repeatedly sought to assure the public that the dangers are minimal, stating that the bulk of details passed on to third parties will be anonymised or “pseudonymised” — that means it is practically extremely hard for patients to be identified.

But the chance assessment by NHS England, the physique behind the scheme, warns that individuals could be “re-identified” if database information is mixed with other information.

It says: “While there is a privacy risk that the analysts granted accessibility to these pseudonymised flows could possibly re-recognize individuals maliciously by combining the pseudonymised data with other obtainable datasets (a method recognized as a jigsaw assault) such an attack would be illegal and would be topic to sanction by the Info Commissioner’s Workplace.”

The report also warns that sufferers could endure and the all round good quality of information held could be eroded. “The extraction of individual confidential information from providers without having consent carries the threat that sufferers could get rid of believe in in the confidential nature of the well being support,” it says.

“This risk is two-fold firstly, individuals will not get optimum healthcare if they withhold details from the clinicians that are treating them and secondly, that this reduction of trust degrades the quality of data.” Those internet hosting the database want to protect its confidentiality and “guard against threats from within and outside the organisation”, the report’s authors say.

The document continues: “The risks described contain threats associated with ‘cyberspace’ this kind of as hackers attempting to access the information illegally.”

The risk evaluation emerged right after NHS statistics, uncovered more than the weekend, showed that wellness providers had been dropping or breaching the safety of two,000 patient information every single day. More than 2 million critical data breaches by the NHS have been logged given that the start off of 2011, the figures reveal, with data dumped in landfill web sites, left in shops and even offered on eBay.

Final week the Royal School of Standard Practitioners — which represents 46,000 GPs — mentioned there was a “crisis of public confidence” more than programs which have not been properly communicated to the public.

The intervention came as 5 key charities, including Mencap, the finding out disability organisation, and the Royal National Institute of Blind Men and women, accused NHS officials operating the scheme of unfair remedy of those with disabilities, who they say are much more very likely to be identified yet are less most likely to opt out, due to the fact they have not been told about it.

Nick Pickles, director of Large Brother View, questioned on Sunday night no matter whether the public had been “deliberately stored in the dark” about risks which are not explained in public data leaflets currently being sent to each home.

He stated: “Medical data hold some of our most delicate info and the threat to people’s privacy of them being maliciously stolen or re-recognized have to not be underestimated. From blackmailers to analysis firms, the worth could be considerable.” Fears have been raised information could be utilised by healthcare firms to target the sale of items or could fall into the hands of insurers. Roger Goss, from Patient Concern, mentioned: “This document confirms every little thing we have warned about — the human expense of placing all patients’ health-related historical past into this database is possibly disastrous.”

The Privacy Influence Assessment by NHS England suggests that the hazards of hacking and identification of sufferers should be mitigated by safeguards to manage the use of the data. Tim Kelsey, nationwide director for individuals and information at NHS England, stated: “The Privacy Influence Evaluation is a dwell document, which will be constantly updated as our drive for better data continues, and as we continue our conversations with the public about how the NHS employs data.

“On legal troubles this kind of as risks of hacking and information misuse by folks, the document sets out plainly the substantial-level technical and contractual safeguards towards them. On ethical problems like patient believe in in the system, the document exhibits we have pledged to ensure public awareness of the scheme, its rewards, its hazards, and patients’ rights to register objection.”

NHS admits new health-related information database could pose privacy threat