EHIP

Rescue plan renews health IT privacy debate

The plan to add health information technology to the multibillion-dollar economic stimulus package legislators are developing has renewed the debate over how to protect patient privacy in a nationwide health IT system.

In offering advice to lawmakers, advocates are staking out familiar territory: One side argues that health IT often speeds information sharing into the wrong hands, while the other says overly tough privacy protections could negate the benefits of health IT.

Peel took aim at a group called the Confidentiality Coalition, which she said had suggested that privacy and consumer protections be de-emphasized in the stimulus package.

Automated summary from: Government Health IT

Law Enforcement Unravels Extortion Scheme and Prevents Large Scale Identity Fraud

Michael S. Welch, Special Agent in Charge of the Indianapolis Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); Steve Carter, Indiana Attorney General; and Chief Michael Spears, Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department jointly announced today the arrest of Kevin Michael Stewart by the FBI Cyber Crime Task Force and the Safe Streets Task Force in Indianapolis, Indiana at 12:30 a.m. this morning.

The server contained personally identifying and health care sensitive information for over 900,000 policy holders.

Stewart is also accused of extorting AIG for $208,000 under a threat to release the data onto the Internet beginning on July 23, 2008.

Agencies participating in the task force include the Evansville Police Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Indiana Attorney General's office, Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Indiana State Police, Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, United States Secret Service, and the Vanderburgh County Sheriff's Office.

Automated summary from: Federal Bureau of Investigation

Who is looking at your medical records?

Even if the people in question are highly qualified health professionals.

With the possible exception of your bank account details, medical histories are the most sensitive - and potentially embarrassing - examples of personal data held by the authorities.

Yet more people than ever before are being allowed access to them - and it is raising serious concerns about confidentiality.

This week, in Scotland, seven BBC journalists were told that their medical records had been inappropriately accessed by a unnamed doctor in Fife through a new central database.

Automated summary from: BBC News

Report: 21 million German bank accounts for sale

Black market criminals are offering to sell details on 21 million German bank accounts for ¬12 million (US$15.3 million), according to an investigative report published Saturday.

Reporters for WirtschaftsWoche (Economic Week) managed to obtain a CD containing 1.2 million accounts after a November face-to-face meeting with criminals in a Hamburg hotel, according to the magazine.

That CD contained the names, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, account numbers and bank routing numbers of the theft victims, they reported.

This is the second high-profile German data breach in the past two months.

Automated summary from: IT World

Analyst cuts IMS target on data privacy questions

A Credit Suisse analyst cut his price target on shares of IMS Health Inc. on Friday, saying the market research company's products will become less valuable if U.S. states follow New Hampshire's lead by making prescription data private.

BuzzOn Nov. 18, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the New Hampshire Prescription Information Law, which makes prescribing information confidential.

Santangelo said 20 states have considered similar laws over the last few years, but none had successfully banned the practice.

Automated summary from: Forbes

U.K. DNA Database Violates Privacy Rights, Court Says

The 17-judge Grand Chamber of the Strasbourg, France-based court said the "blanket and indiscriminate nature" of keeping data on individuals "failed to strike a fair balance between the competing public and private interests.".

The lawsuits were filed in 2004 by two Sheffield, U.K., residents who were refused their applications to destroy their DNA samples, fingerprints and profiles after they were cleared of crimes in separate cases.

Within the Council of Europe, only England, Wales and Northern Ireland allow fingerprints and DNA samples from suspects of any age to be retained indefinitely, the court said.

"DNA and fingerprinting is vital to the fight against crime, providing the police with more than 3,500 matches a month, and I am disappointed by the European Court of Human Rights' decision," said Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in an e-mailed statement.

The database was developed after a campaign by the parents of Louise Smith, 18, who was murdered near Bristol, England, on Christmas Day 1994.

Retaining such data "irrespective of the nature or gravity of the offense with which the individual was originally suspected or of the age of the suspected offender" risks stigmatizing people "entitled to the presumption of innocence" because the data was held in the same manner as convicted people, the court said.

Automated summary from: Bloomberg

You're Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?

Every moment he has his Windows Mobile smartphone with him, they know where he is, and who's nearby.

Mr. Brown and about 100 other students living in Random Hall at M.I.T. have agreed to swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails to be beamed to a central computer.

Coupled with information already gathered from sources like Web surfing and credit cards, the data is the basis for an emerging field called collective intelligence.

Propelled by new technologies and the Internet's steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize.

Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage.

Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology.

"There are so many uses for this technology --- from marketing to war fighting --- that I can't imagine it not pervading our lives in just the next few years," says Steve Steinberg, a computer scientist who works for an investment firm in New York.

Automated summary from: NYTimes.com

The Value of Privacy? Make an Offer

Cellular infrastructure provider Transverse and research firm iGR, Inc. were fishing around 810 wireless customers to see how receptive they might be to trading free mobile services for exposure to advertising and sharing their data with marketers.

The remarkably detailed questions about privacy in this sample suggest that increasingly Americans see their own digital history as a commodity in the marketplace they can barter for services, but at a high price.

About 34% had reservations about ad-driven mobile incentive programs because they were unsure how the advertisers would use any information the consumers shared, while 49% worried about not knowing who else might have access to their data.

On the critical question of whether customers are willing to have their "mobile usage information documented and dispersed by your mobile operator in exchange for discounted services," a little less than 50% said "No" outright.

More intriguing are the 13% who said yes flatly and the 33% who said it would depend on the incentives.

In other words, something like 46% of mobile users were willing to barter their usage data for discounts on marketer products or mobile service generally.

"We were surprised that they weren't only willing to participate but willing to hand over a degree of personal information as the discounts increased," says Chris Couch, Transverse COO.

Less than 10% of users were impressed by trading usage information for a 25% phone bill discount.

Automated summary from: MediaPost