Sooner or later, all data turns into health data

Christophe Schneble (Photo: University of Basel, Florian Moritz) - Anyone who owns a smartphone, uses social media or drives a "smart" car unwittingly reveals a lot about themselves. Even data that doesn't seem sensitive today could in future allow unforeseen conclusions to be drawn about a person's health, as ethicist Christophe Schneble of the Institute for Biomedical Ethics of the University of Basel explains in this interview. Mr. Schneble, you explore ethical questions about indirect, inferred, and invisible health data. What does that mean? When we think of health data, we usually think of digitized patient data that includes direct information about a person's health status. But as the amount of data of all kinds constantly grows and becomes increasingly linked, even data that does not appear particularly sensitive can suddenly allow conclusions to be drawn about a person's health and risk of disease. For example, smartphone location data combined with environmental data can be used to infer the risk of respiratory disease if someone frequently spends time in places with a lot of traffic and high particulate matter pollution. So that would be inferred health data.