Mohana Ravindranath reports: The federal government is attempting to ensure that doctors don’t inadvertently compromise patient data when they use smartphones to access electronic health records. The National Institutes of Standards in Technology this week released a step-by-step guide for hospitals and IT professionals, listing ways to secure the connection between devices and electronic health records. NIST is collecting public comment on…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
UK: FoI reveals scale of financial data loss
Tessa Norman reports on the results of a freedom of information request filed with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the U.K.: Incidents reported to the regulator include a consumer credit firm which lost in transit a server containing customer details, affecting 5 million people. The regulator informed the Information Commissioner’s Office of the incident….
Ontario hit with hundreds of privacy-breach complaints
Richard J. Brennan reports: Ontario has been hit with more than 200 privacy complaints about the mishandling of personal information by the provincial government or its agencies over the past 18 months, according to the information and privacy commissioner. Most of them can be chalked up to human error or computer glitches, but the common thread in…
Is there a “constitutional right to informational privacy”? as claimed by NTEU’s data breach lawsuit?
On July 8, in noting NTEU’s lawsuit over the OPM hack, I had questioned the suit’s claim that the government breach constituted a violation of their “constitutional right to informational privacy.” Jennifer E. Canfield of Montgomery McCracken Walker & Rhoads LLP also picked up on that point and discusses the issue on Montgomery McCracken Data Privacy…
NYS Comptroller Audit of Onteora Central School District: Information Technology
From the well-there’s-certainly-room-for-improvement dept.: Scope and Objective The objective of our audit was to determine whether the District’s IT assets were adequately safeguarded for the period July 1, 2013 through November 5, 2014. We extended our review of data extracted from the District’s computers and networks through the end of our fieldwork March 3, 2015….
When Is it Ethical to Publish Stolen Data?
Helen Lewis has a lengthy, and thought-provoking piece on Nieman Reports that asks, Journalists have been accused of invading privacy, threatening national security, and breaching copyright by publishing such stories, and their sources might lose their jobs, their freedom, or even their lives. So how should reporters and editors decide whether to publish and how much…