Open data is key to genomics research — if the information can be kept safe

"In April, de-identified biomedical data for 500,000 UK Biobank participants appeared for sale on an e-commerce platform owned by Alibaba, a global technology company based in Hangzhou, China. As soon as the listings were discovered, the UK Biobank and Alibaba worked together with the UK and Chinese governments to remove them before any sales occurred. The UK Biobank temporarily suspended access to its research platform, tightened up its monitoring of the data being exported from the platform and imposed bans on the academic institutions to which the data had originally been released."