Privacy Worries

The Guardian reports that only one in 10 people invited to take part in the UK's Biobank project are signing up due in part to privacy concerns. The goal of the project is to follow and collect medical data from a half a million Britons between the ages of 40 and 69 to study the influence of environment, genes, and lifestyle on disease risk. Anonymous data from the study will be entered into a database that approved researchers can access. A report from the Biobank ethics councils says that potential participants are worried that their information will be shared with companies.