Phil Booth

Phil Booth is a leading British campaigner on medical confidentiality, patient consent, digital identity and the governance of personal data. He is the coordinator of medConfidential, an independent, non-partisan organisation campaigning for confidentiality and consent in health and social care information. His work focuses on how NHS patient data is collected, linked, shared and reused by government bodies, researchers, healthcare organisations and private technology suppliers.

Phil has been closely involved in many of the most significant debates surrounding health-data policy in the United Kingdom. Through medConfidential, he has scrutinised care.data, the national data opt-out, General Practice Data for Planning and Research, the extraction of GP records and the increasing use of large-scale data platforms across the NHS. His work has focused particularly on whether patients understand how their information is being used, whether existing opt-outs provide meaningful control, and whether pseudonymised health data can genuinely be treated as anonymous when it is linked across different systems and over time.

Before establishing medConfidential, Booth was National Coordinator of NO2ID, the cross-party campaign formed in opposition to the introduction of compulsory identity cards and the National Identity Register. The campaign argued that the proposed system would create a centralised “database state” in which personal information could be increasingly shared, linked and used across government. Booth has since returned to the role amid renewed debate over digital identity in the UK and the growing use of automated systems to manage access to employment, healthcare and public services.

Phil has given evidence to Parliament on patient-data governance, privacy and government information systems, and is a regular contributor to public debates about confidentiality, surveillance, digital identity and the outsourcing of public-sector technology. Through his work with medConfidential and NO2ID, he has become an important voice in discussions about the relationship between citizens, governments and private technology companies. His recent work has examined Palantir’s expanding role in the NHS, the risks of vendor lock-in, the limits of current patient opt-outs and the wider consequences of allowing critical public infrastructure to become dependent on privately controlled data platforms.