This was sent to a WhatsApp group I'm part of in response to someone reading that Guardian article and saying they were opting out. The response below is from someone deep in NHS IT security who actually, unlike the journalists, and people randomly speculating on internet forums, knows what they're on about...
"I'm sorry to say this article is the most perverse misrepresentation of reality. Barely a statement made in it is correct (note that it is an opinion, not a fact piece).
Firstly the data is strongly pseudonymised so no one will be able to see your medical records. They'll be able to see that, for example, 2000 people in Manchester from disadvantaged postcodes have died from lung cancer as opposed to only 1000 in privileged areas. This will allow the NHS to improve commissioning accordingly.
Secondly, the (anonymous) data will absolutely not be blithely given to corporations. There is an incredibly complex vetting procedure before it can be shared with anyone, including academic institutions. Private companies will certainly not be getting hold of the data for anything like corporate profit. For example [someone we know] will be trying to get hold of some of this anonymised data in order to develop a genetic test that will identify people at most risk of getting long Covid and / or most at risk of ending up in hospital with Covid. It will take at least 6 months and 10s of thousands of taxpayers pounds before he can get that data for that purpose alone.
Thirdly, this is the application of an incredibly extensive public and professional consultation that took years and completed in 2013. It cost the NHS about 10 million in PR alone. That means the Guardian has had 8 years to thoroughly question and investigate rather than release inflammatory articles six weeks before this particularly data transfer event. You can read a part of that public consultation here - www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-information-governance-review
Fourthly, your data won't be shared in six weeks. It will be moved in six weeks. In fact in will be moved from the database of a couple of private organisation with dubious corporate motives and very poor security (I could look at your medical records now if I really wanted too) to a much more secure system with better security and under much fuller public scrutiny. In fact, the specific counter example mentioned in which Google got hold of data occurred precisely because a local, less experienced, hospital was in charge of that data instead of a more transparent public system.
Fifthly, that data is actually moving precisely to the “Trusted Research Environment” that the author suggests we should be using.
The main reason that a few GPs are up in arms are because moving this data represents a egalitarian reset of the control of patient data from private GP practices and private corporations like Emis and TPP to a public controlled environment. The NHS has suffered quite badly from a very slow evolution towards digital patient data sharing. Tens of thousands of patients have undoubtedly died as a result of the failure of the last attempt to improve data sharing. That being said, there is an inevitable trade-off between data confidentiality and patient treatment. So it will and should remain the case that thousands of patients will die in order to ensure better security of data. But the balance has been completely out of whack for years now. The best example of this is that it has been really hard to provide evidence of the disparity of treatment between wealthy and poorer parts of the country and this has led to a continued uninformed approach to commissioning.
I do think that the government could be doing a better job of explaining the situation. Although equally I think it is quite hard when NHS Digital and others are having to balance spending tax payers money on further marketing with spending it on treatment. If you want to read about the most recent data sharing event you can review this - digital.nhs.uk/coronavirus/gpes-data-for-pandemic-planning-and-research/general-practice-transparency-notice. I do feel it would have provided a hint of balance if the Guardian article had provided a link to it and enabled the public to be better informed about the details allowing them to make their own mind up."