The American Health Information Management Association has issue a Health Information Bill of Rights (pdf). The Preamble states: […] AHIMA has established these seven measures for the sole purpose of protecting healthcare consumers. Ours is a comprehensive set of liberties to safeguard every individual’s right to lawful access of their personal health information; to prevent…
Author: Dissent
City admits lapse in data release
Sewell Chan reports: On Tuesday, New York City rolled out the next phase of its NYC BigApps competition, an initiative that will supply local programmers and developers with a stockpile of raw municipal data sets to build applications for the Web and mobile phones. But in what appears to have been an accidental data breach,…
Man who stole for penis enlargements, breast implants sent to prison
Kevin Amerman reports: A Philadelphia man who authorities say stole the identities of eight Lehigh Valley residents to rack up $88,000 of bills in their names, partly to buy penis enlargements for him and a friend and breast implants for two women, could serve nearly two decades behind bars. Lehigh County Judge Maria L. Dantos…
Highmark changes it procedures in wake of BCBS breach
Another lesson learned the hard way? In the aftermath of the theft of a Blue Cross Blue Shield laptop, Highmark, Inc. notified 50,000 doctors that their Social Security numbers or tax ID numbers were on the stolen laptop containing their unencrypted data. A BCBS employee had reportedly breached policy by downloading the unencrypted database to…
Hannaford breach case not over yet
Trevor Maxwell reports: Just as a potential class-action lawsuit against Hannaford Bros. appeared dead, there’s a glimmer of hope this week for consumers who hope to recover damages from the Scarborough-based grocer for a massive electronic data theft in late 2007 and early 2008. The federal judge overseeing the case plans to ask Maine’s highest…
Gmail, AOL and Yahoo logins posted online; weak passwords
Charles Arthur of The Guardian suggests that the leaked email passwords may affect even more people than previously suggested: More than a quarter of a million email accounts on the biggest webmail services are believed to be at risk from online criminals after thousands of passwords belonging to users of the Yahoo, AOL and Gmail…