Brock N. Meeks of CDT writes: A case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court has serious implications for how privacy protections are interpreted. But understanding the various risks posed in this case requires some careful unpacking of the ways in which “privacy” is—and is not—at issue here. CDT’s Health Privacy Project team has taken a look…
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Location Privacy And Wireless Body Area Networks
MIT Technology Review’s The Physics arXiv Blog has an article that gave me some food for thought about the wireless monitoring systems being used on patients to record blood pressure and other vital signs or activity. Although the health data/measures may be encrypted, the location of the device’s unique hardware address is not encrypted…
Congressman tackles HIPAA Catch-22 to help medical ID theft victims
Last week, I posted a news item about how medical ID theft victims were getting victimized twice – once by the criminal and once by those hospitals that interpret HIPAA as barring them from showing patients their own records if they contain information on another patient – even if that patient is the ID thief….
Former hospital administrator who fired two whistleblower nurses gets jail time for his abuse of official capacity
It’s nice to see a small measure of justice occasionally. Back in 2009, I covered a report about two nurses, subsequently identified as Anne Mitchell, RN and Vickilyn Galle, RN, who were facing jail time for reporting a physician, Dr. Rolando Arafiles, to the Texas Medical Board. According to investigators with the Attorney General’s Office,…
Privacy not at risk in Medicare, Centrelink merger: OAIC
Chloe Herrick reports: The impending merger of Medicare Australia and Centrelink under new legislation will not trample Australians’ privacy according to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC). In its submission to the Senate community affairs committee (PDF) Australian Privacy Commissioner, Timothy Pilgrim – one of three commissioners at the OAIC – argued the merger…
Way to risk those lawsuits, U. Iowa!
Having your employees find out that you are monitoring them surreptitiously doesn’t make for happy employees and may lead to legal problems in terms of surveillance laws and labor laws. Having a patient privacy incident can be infinitely worse. Managing to risk combining both can be a nightmare. But that’s somewhat what happened recently in…