Attorney General William Sorrell filed a complaint and proposed settlement Friday with Health Net, Inc., and Health Net of the Northeast, Inc., regarding the health insurance company’s loss of an unencrypted portable hard drive containing protected health information. The complaint alleges violations of HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), Vermont’s Security Breach Notice Act, and…
Author: Dissent
Nurse Fired for Snooping in Tiger Woods' Records Files Defamation Suit
David Rothenberg was the charge nurse on duty at Health Central Hospital in Ocoee on Nov. 27, 2009, as paramedics wheeled in Tiger Woods. The golfer had just crashed his Cadillac Escalade into a tree and fire hydrant outside his Isleworth home. According to Rothenberg, within hours of Woods’s arrival, someone inside the hospital improperly…
Vermont Attorney General Settles Security Breach Allegations Against Health Net
Attorney General William Sorrell filed a complaint and proposed settlement Friday with Health Net, Inc., and Health Net of the Northeast, Inc., regarding the health insurance company’s loss of an unencrypted portable hard drive containing protected health information. The complaint alleges violations of HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), Vermont’s Security Breach Notice Act, and…
(follow-up) Junior doctor's stolen laptop: files had been emailed
Following up on the Hull Royal Infirmary and Castle Hill Hospital incident: Dan Raywood quotes a hospital spokesperson who indicates that the doctor had emailed the data to himself. It seems that while the hospital had controls in place to prevent downloading data, its controls to prevent emailing data were not adequate to prevent this…
Sydney Festival in privacy glitch
Luke Hopewell reports: Organisers behind the annual Sydney Festival have inadvertently committed a privacy breach by sending an email to users that displayed the contents of its mailing list. The email contains the email addresses of around 130 people who registered for a festival mailing list, some from government departments, Sony Music, JP Morgan and…
NSW Privacy Commissioner investigates University of Sydney data breach
Ben Grubb reports: NSW acting privacy commissioner John McAteer today said that his office was “examining” a data breach through which the detailed records of thousands of University of Sydney students past and present were leaked. The records were being stored online where they could be downloaded easily and read via an internet connection. It…