---
title: "Data breach at Liberating Research"
description: "Liberating Research, a UK company that pays patients and medical professionals to answer surveys about their conditions, left an Elasticsearch server publicly accessible. UpGuard discovered it on 17 August 2026 and notified the company the same day; the server was secured the next day. The data cove"
canonical: https://inyourgeek.com/en/fuites-de-donnees/2026-10-13-liberating-research
type: fuite-de-donnees
author: "Sébastien Soulier"
publisher: "InYourGeek"
language: en
datePublished: 2026-10-13
dateModified: 2026-10-13
---
# Liberating Research

Data breach — Critical

Liberating Research, a UK company that pays patients and medical professionals to answer surveys about their conditions, left an Elasticsearch server publicly accessible. UpGuard discovered it on 17 August 2026 and notified the company the same day; the server was secured the next day. The data covers just over 100,000 people according to UpGuard (nearly 100,000 per DataBreaches.net): patients, medical professionals and charitable organisations. It mixes personally identifiable information with medical diagnoses for about 67% of them. The incident was made public on 13 October 2026, after UpGuard and DataBreaches.net agreed to delay publication.

Diagnoses linked to identifying information allow a third party to target a person based on their medical condition, for example through phishing or abusive solicitation.

| Fact | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Disclosed on | October 13, 2026 |
| Incident dated | August 17, 2026 |
| Sector | Healthcare |
| Country | GB |
| Cause | Misconfigured database |
| Severity | Critical |
| Status | Confirmed |

## Exposed data

- Health data
- Other personal data

## What you can do

- Health data is “special category” data under the GDPR: a leak opens a right to compensation, and the organisation must notify the DPA within 72 hours.
- You can ask the organisation exactly what was exposed about you (right of access), and complain to the DPA if no answer comes within a month.

## Sources

- [UK: Commercial market research and data-gathering firm in the medical space leaked health data](https://databreaches.net/2026/10/13/uk-commercial-market-research-and-data-gathering-firm-in-the-medical-space-leaked-health-data/) — DataBreaches.net
- [Clinical Oversight: Medical Survey Firm Exposes Diagnoses of Participants](https://www.upguard.com/breaches/clinical-oversight-medical-survey-firm-exposes-diagnoses-participants) — UpGuard

_Entry built from the cited sources after a corroboration check, then reviewed before publication._

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