WORLD VIEW

12 May 2026

Trust is no longer enough: secure data sharing requires international collaboration across institutions and governments.

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Shuhua Xu Shuhua Xu is a human population geneticist at the State Key Laboratory of Genetics and Development of Complex Phenotypes, School of Life Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.

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.…