Dan Goodin reports: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft’s Bing, and other leading websites are leaking medical histories, family income, search queries, and massive amounts of other sensitive data that can be intercepted even when encrypted, computer scientists revealed in a new research paper. Researchers from Indiana University and Microsoft itself were able to infer the sensitive data…
Category: Health Data
Three newly revealed breaches affect over 20,000 (updated)
The new HHS/OCR web site has added two three more breach reports: Montefiore Medical Center State: New York Approx. # of Individuals Affected: 625 Date of Breach: 2/20/10 Type of Breach: Theft Location of Breached Information: Laptop Private Practice City and State: San Antonio, Texas Approx. # of Individuals Affected: 21,000 Date of Breach: 2/20/10…
N.L. health staff disciplined after deliberately breaching patient records
Newfoundland and Labrador’s health care system suffered another setback Wednesday when the province’s largest health board revealed that some of its staff had deliberately breached the privacy of patients. Hours after the province’s health minister announced that strides had been made to improve health care since the breast cancer testing scandal, Eastern Health said some…
Surgeon Posted Nude Photos, Woman Says
Srin McAuley reports: A woman claims her plastic surgeon posted nude photos of her on Facebook without her consent. She claims Dr. Dennis Hurwitz and the Hurwitz Center for Plastic Surgery posted Before and After photos of her from her neck to her knees, along with her name, allowing anyone who looked at the photos…
Patient Billed for Phony Liposuction as Medical ID Theft Rises
Margaret Collins reports on medical ID theft: Sierra Morgan was billed $12,000 on her health-care credit card in November for liposuction, a procedure she never requested or had. “It’s depressing to know that someone used my name and knows so much about me,” said the 31-year-old respiratory therapist from Modesto, California. There were more than…
Breaches of patients' data raise questions on security methods
In the aftermath of the recent Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center breach, John Hinton of the Winston-Salem Journal has this piece on hospitals allowing employees to remove patient data from their facilities and whether patients know that that might happen.