Nudging Consent and the New Opt-Out System to the Processing of Health Data in England

Janos Meszaros (), Chih-hsing Ho and Marcelo Corrales Compagnucci
Additional contact information
Janos Meszaros: Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica
Chih-hsing Ho: Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica
Marcelo Corrales Compagnucci: Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen

A chapter in Legal Tech and the New Sharing Economy, 2020, pp 93-113 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This chapter examines the challenges of the revised opt-out systemOpt-out system and the secondary use of health dataHealth data in England. The analysis of this dataData could be valuable for science and medical treatment as well as for the discovery of new drugs. For this reason, the UKUnited Kingdom (UK) government established the “care.dataData program” in 2013. The aim of the project was to build a central nationwide database for research and policy planning. However, the processing of personal dataData was planned without proper public engagement. Research has suggested that ITInformation Technology (IT) companies—such as in the Google DeepMind deal case—had access to sensitive dataData and failed to comply with data protectionData protection law. Since May 2018, the government has launched the “national data opt-outNational Data Opt-out System (ND opt-out)” (ND opt-out) system with the hope of regaining public trustTrust. Nevertheless, there is no evidence of significant changes in the ND opt-out, compared to the previous opt-out systemOpt-out system. Neither in the use of secondary dataData, nor in the choices that patients can make. The only notorious difference seems to be in the way that these options are communicated and framed to the patients. Most importantly, according to the new ND opt-out, the type-1 opt-out option—which is the only choice that truly stops dataData from being shared outside direct care—will be removed in 2020. According to the Behavioral Law and Economics literature (Nudge TheoryNudge theory), default rulesDefault rules—such as the revised opt-out systemOpt-out system in England—are very powerful, because people tend to stick to the default choices made readily available to them. The crucial question analyzed in this chapter is whether it is desirable for the UKUnited Kingdom (UK) government to stop promoting the type-1 opt-outs, and whether this could be seen as a kind of “hard paternalism.”

Keywords: Nudge theory; Choice architectures; Opt-out system; Personal data; GDPR; ND opt-out; Hard paternalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:perchp:978-981-15-1350-3_6

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9789811513503

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-15-1350-3_5

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Perspectives in Law, Business and Innovation from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().