Abstract

Synthetic data has been put forward as a technical solution to facilitate health data sharing in the UK through the anonymisation of personal data needed for training AI systems. Indeed, many of the legal debates about synthetic data have been about whether it falls within the scope of personal data or anonymised data. In this talk, I consider how reframing synthetic data in data protection law reveals other privacy benefits and how its use ultimately draws attention to broader, unresolved debates in the secondary use of health data. Additionally, I also consider whether the use of synthetic data, while used as a privacy-enhancing technology, may draw other ethical challenges in relation to consent, trust and health equity. Thus, while it is tempting to treat synthetic data as a solution to many of the existing legal and ethical challenges in the UK’s data-sharing landscape, this talk raises caution, situates synthetic data in the context of existing challenges, whilst also identifying genuine opportunities for its use in healthcare. 

Speaker Biography

Zoya Yasmine is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford in the Faculty of Law. Her research focuses on the intersections between data protection, intellectual property, ethics, and medical AI. She is also a Research Analyst at GSK in the Responsible AI team, where her work focuses on the secondary use of health data for scientific research and privacy-enhancing technologies. 

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