06/04/2026
In April, the genomic and health data of 500,000 people went up for sale online. No firewall failed. The data had been shared legitimately with researchers, and it still ended up listed for anyone to buy.
That's the UK Biobank breach, and most people never heard about it. But no state has more to learn from it than California, where we hold more research IP than almost anywhere and share it with the same partners, CROs, and cloud platforms.
The lesson for any California business: your most valuable data is also your most shared data, and you can't reissue a genome. And here, a leak of genetic or health data carries real legal weight under California's privacy laws.
We wrote up what to take from it and what to check this quarter.
https://na2.hubs.ly/H05YMMH0