Minister for Health enables secure access to COVID-19 Data Research Hub
Today, Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly TD, has launched an initiative to facilitate safe and secure access to COVID-19 data for valid health research purposes.
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has been maintaining a COVID-19 Data Research Hub since April 2020. To date this data has been used solely by a sub-group of the National Public Health Emergency Team to conduct statistical analysis on healthcare data.
Now, in partnership with the CSO and the Health Research Board (HRB), an application process has been put in place to enable registered researchers to apply to access the data for research purposes. A series of safeguards have been put in place to protect patient privacy under stringent and transparent rules while advancing our understanding of COVID-19 for the benefit of people’s health, patient care as well as health care policy and planning. Following a rigorous approval p
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Products designed by Google for use in schools are do not have sufficient privacy safeguards in place, education ministers Arie Slob and Ingrid van Engelshoven have told MPs in a briefing.
The research, known as a Data Protection Impact Assessment, was carried out following a vote by MPs last year.
Schools have been forced to focus on online education by coronavirus and Google Workspace and Google Workspace for Education are made up of various software applications – including Gmail, Google Classroom and Google Docs – which are designed to make it easier to work together.
While the data does not include personal information and results, ministers say it is up to Google itself to decide what do with the data which is collected. That data, for example, shows what users click on, how long they are logged on and what search terms they use.
Launched in October, Google Workspace is an enterprise suite for applications including Gmail, Meet, Drive, and Sheets, software that can be useful for businesses currently adopting work from home or hybrid workplace models.
A Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) was recently published by Dutch data protection authorities outlining comparisons between data handling in Google Workspace.
The DPIA included ten original risk factors to government agencies adopting Google Workspace, citing issues including a lack of transparency concerning the purposes behind processing both customer and diagnostic data; potential legal gray areas surrounding both the tech giant and government bodies acting as data controllers or processors, privacy-unfriendly default settings, and potential spill-overs between one-account users in personal and enterprise settings.
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