Joseph Lazzarotti and Jason Gavejian discuss the recent fines by CDPH and the warning they convey: California hospitals and nursing homes take note – the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) takes data breaches seriously. Since June of this year, CDPH has imposed nearly $1.5 million in fines affecting 12 California health facilities. […] As…
Author: Dissent
(update) Ringleader pleads in S.A.’s largest ID theft case
The 2006 theft of 17,000 customers’ credit card receipts from the Emily Morgan Hotel in San Antonio, Texas resulted in the largest case of ID theft the city has seen, as noted in previous coverage. A few elements of the case really struck me at the time the case made the news in 2009: (1)…
Wikileaks Cablegate: Time to Blame the Victim?
Paul Roberts writes: The Pentagon says the leak of diplomatic cables was an unforeseen consequence of its policy to encourage information sharing. That’s nonsense. When it comes to its failure to protect classified data, Uncle Sam’s been warned before. […] It was an act of almost total malfeasance, the responsibility for which lies squarely in…
Ca: Patient names to stay private
Pamela Cowan reports: Protecting the privacy of patients trumps raising donor dollars for the province’s hospital foundations — at least for now. This spring, the provincial government amended health privacy regulations so health regions could share with their local hospital foundation the names and addresses of people who’d received hospital services. The policy set out…
Is “Data Mining” of Prescription and Patient Records Protected By the First Amendment?
Naomi Freundlich writes: A year ago, I wrote about how pharmaceutical companies are increasingly paying third parties like IMS Health or CVS-Caremark to provide them with the prescribing records and identification information for individual doctors. Armed with this information, drug companies—sometimes taking on the role of “concerned experts”—can tailor their marketing directly to these doctors;…
Boss orders female staff to wear red bracelets when they are on their periods
I had to check the site twice to make sure this wasn’t a satire site as this is just so outrageous. Ian Sparks reports: A boss in Norway has ordered all female staff to wear red bracelets during their periods – to explain why they are using the toilet more often. The astonishing demand was…