Health Privacy
The first thing you should know about HIPAA is that it’s HIPAA, not HIPPA. There is only one P, and that P doesn’t stand for “privacy.” - Sara Morrison
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Your Health Data Isn’t as Safe as You Think
We relinquish all kinds of data to tech companies in exchange for convenience. We hand over our location, our heart rates and even imprints of our eyeballs because we want to order an Uber, track a workout or get through airport security faster. But we expect one thing to be mostly kept private: our medical histories.
In a way, our health information is the last sacrosanct piece of personal information. That’s why people were so surprised to learn Google had a deal with Ascension to handle tens of millions of patient records, including full names, test results and diagnoses.
They’re right to be confused: Aren’t there laws that protect patients when it comes to health information?
Resources
The Future of Healthcare Could Be a Privacy Nightmare
The Amazon healthcare effort and CVS-Aetna merger raise lots of questions.
Are vaccine providers selling your health data? There’s not much stopping them
How a vaccine clinic scandal in Philadelphia shows the need for better health privacy laws.
Companies Are Using Big Data To Track Employee Health And Pregnancies
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) protects confidentiality of personal healthcare information. But Janine Hiller, a law professor at Virginia Tech, notes in an interview with Popular Science, that if the firms only present employers with aggregated data and use sources such as search queries, the data they collect is no longer considered protected health information and is not covered by HIPAA.
Google’s Totally Creepy, Totally Legal Health-Data Harvesting
Google is an emerging health-care juggernaut, and privacy laws weren’t written to keep up.
HIPAA, the health privacy law that’s more limited than you think, explained
You probably don’t know what HIPAA really means. Let’s fix that.
Mining Electronic Records for Revealing Health Data
The monitoring and analysis of electronic medical records, some scientists say, have the potential to make every patient a participant in a vast, ongoing clinical trial, pinpointing treatments and side effects that would be hard to discern from anecdotal case reports or expensive clinical trials.
When Apps Get Your Medical Data, Your Privacy May Go With It
Americans may soon be able to get their medical records through smartphone apps as easily as they order takeout food from Seamless or catch a ride from Lyft. But prominent medical organizations are warning that patient data-sharing with apps could facilitate invasions of privacy — and they are fighting the change. The battle stems from landmark medical information-sharing rules that the federal government is now working to complete. The rules will for the first time require health providers to send medical information to third-party apps, like Apple’s Health Records, after a patient has authorized the data exchange
Your Health Care Information Is Insecure — And Extremely Lucrative On The Black Market
And there’s very little you can do about it.
Your private medical data is for sale – and it's driving a business worth billions
Although information is anonymized, data miners and brokers can build up detailed dossiers on individual patients by cross-referencing with other sources
Your Health Data Isn’t as Safe as You Think
Silicon Valley’s rush into the health-care business is challenging the antiquated protections of Americans’ medical histories
Another threat to abortion privacy? Health websites tracking and sharing your data
Given the amount of information that still leaks out, though, individual action will never be enough. When it comes to online health privacy, abortion exposed the growing tracking ecosystem. If we don’t update data privacy tools, the concept of health privacy may soon be a memory.
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