Jaikumar Vijayan reports: After more than two years of trying, the City of Los Angeles has abandoned plans to migrate its police department to Google’s hosted email and office application platform saying the service cannot meet certain FBI security requirements. As a result, close to 13,000 law-enforcement employees will remain indefinitely on the LAPD’s existing…
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Fertile sperm donor draws criticism from FDA, docs
Marcus Wohlsen of Associated Press reports: Physicians and the federal government cited the case of a San Francisco Bay area man who has fathered 14 children as an example of the risks posed by the informal market for sperm donations, which doctors consider unsafe but some people call a civil liberties issue. Trent Arsenault, 36,…
Law enforcement can access data bank without doctors' knowledge
Carolyne Krupa reports: Physicians and other health professionals no longer will be notified if someone accesses information about them through the National Practitioner Data Bank for an investigation, according to a federal rule that takes effect Dec. 23. The rule, an exemption to the Privacy Act, is meant to prevent tampering with evidence and is…
UK: How anonymous is NHS patient data? Dept. of Health granted 132 requests for identifiable patient data without patient consent
Sade Laja reports: A claim by the Department of Health that patient data shared with private firms for medical research would be anonymised has been challenged by privacy campaigners. The prime minister said last week that plans to share records and other NHS data would make it easier to develop and test new drugs and…
Dallas convicts no longer shred confidential data
Jason Whitely reports the demise of a practice that never should have been: Dallas County’s little-known community service program which lets convicted criminals sort and then shred confidential documents and personal information has come to an end after News 8 questioned the practice. For more than a decade, parolees and probationers had been working off…
UK: Patient data-sharing may not take account of anonymisation concerns
Earlier this week the Government announced proposals (40-page / 2.1MB PDF) to change the NHS Constitution so that information stored about patients would be automatically shared with life sciences researchers via a new anonymised database unless patients elect for their details not to be included. While welcomed by the life sciences industry as a boost to research,…