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Why paying individual people for their health data is a bad idea

Nature Medicine volume 28, pages 1989–1991 (2022)Cite this article

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Paying individual people for their health data will widen inequalities and reduce altruism, luring people to sell their privacy. Health data should instead be treated as collective property, and commercial profits should be shared with the public.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Platform Governance of Digital Practices, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Barbara Prainsack & Nikolaus Forgó

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  1. Barbara Prainsack
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  2. Nikolaus Forgó
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Correspondence to Barbara Prainsack.

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Competing interests

B.P. is a member of the Austrian National Bioethics Commission and chair of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies. N.F. is an independent expert member of the Austrian Data Protection Board (‘Datenschutzrat’), an advisory body to the government projected in Austrian data protection law, and member of the advisory board to the Austrian COVID-19 data platform. This piece does not represent the opinion of any of these committees. Both authors write in their capacity as researchers and subject experts.

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Prainsack, B., Forgó, N. Why paying individual people for their health data is a bad idea. Nat Med 28, 1989–1991 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-022-01955-4

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