RE: My Chart Provides Sensitive Medical Information to Fakebook
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"The 33 hospitals The Markup found sending patient appointment details to Facebook collectively reported more than 26 million patient admissions and outpatient visits in 2020."
"The authors document how there has been a tracking tool installed on many hospitals’ private website pages, which have been collecting patients’ health information. This includes medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor’s appointments."
Legally they can do that. There's nothing that stops a hospital from giving out how many admissions or outpatient visit stats. They can give out how many people were there because they had a stroke, fell and injured themselves, car accident, etc., they can list what prescriptions they prescribe daily, weekly, monthly even but what they can't do is give out who that information involved, in other words any personally identifiable information.
It wouldn't or doesn't surprise me the health department has that information either as they are funded by the government for programs that help reduce or offer programs in area's prone for higher rates or incidences of certain diseases. I am sure the CDC has a tracker also as you can go to their site and look up the data on just about anything. Again, letting the information highway collect that data is not the same as giving out personally identifiable information it just makes it an efficient way to collect data that'd otherwise take years to track. Yes there is nothing stopping them from making money off letting FB and Google gather stats either, it's perfectly legal as long as they don't give out your personal info.
Doesn't surprise me ol' Bob needed something to write about, appears he's finally found a hitch that's profitable for him because sticking peanut butter in some chocolate didn't work out to well for him.
My Chart doesn't aggregate this information. It's supposed to be a communications vehicle for patient/provider private information specifically personally identifiable. My prescriptions. My appointments, and my conditions.
The Markup collected the information reported. That's where it was collectivized. My Chart only has PII.
The Markup collected non personal information otherwise they'd said, and it would have made national headlines, we used the same tracking method and obtained the appointment times of "X" number of individuals that included their names, diagnosis, treatment and prescriptions. It wasn't described that way because nothing illegal happened. So unless your name is "My" you have nothing to worry about.
You seem to be deliberately denying that the information collected by The Markup was 'medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor’s appointments.' That's why they published the article at all. Aggregate information is not newsworthy at all.
PII being sent to Fakebook is what they report.
The national headlines are notoriously averse to reporting on the collection of surveillance data, and it is understandable that the wholly owned assets of the people doing the surveilling would not tell us about it. They also make all kinds of false claims, such as the the Jan. 6 protest was a civil war, and all manner of drivel spooks want to drill into our heads.
I disagree that my information is obviously secure and safe, and have inquired at my local health department without response to date. I continue to consider counsel as necessary to redress this issue at law.
You will do as you prefer.
In what was written it never said they gave out people's names so in that regard it's not personally identifiable information, meaning they can't link what they are collecting back to you. When you can come back and publish those words "that they linked name(s) to the information collected I'll find that more reliable.
I am not denying the medical conditions, prescriptions, appointments weren't collected. Collecting information that shows, for example, ten people came in on June 1 for a doctors appointment, six people suffering dehydration were given saline infusions, two people were given antibiotics for a sinus infection, and two people were treated for cuts or abrasions....none of that information would identify you as one of those ten people. As a matter of fact if you have a doctors appointment that is not protected health information. I know this because I was contacted by a group who were doing a world wide study, they wanted me to participate. They were given my name to contact me as to if when I came to the center for a doctors appointment I could stop by their center in the building and start the process to be included in the study. I, like you, at first was alarmed at how they even got my name. Your name is not protected just your health information, which they'd needed me to join to get by signing a waiver.
If you do not grasp that Meta can use Google's location data tracking to link medical appointments to specific individuals, you should give the matter more thought - even if patient names weren't just automatically handed over by My Chart. Then, of course, the specialty of the provider is cross checked against prescriptions and conditions, and Voila! PII. This can be clarified and verified by the purchase data collected when people use a credit/debit card to buy scrips, and etc. AI is real good at such trivial but tedious tasks. Many such mechanisms are used to link persons to 'anonymized' data, and the audacity to abuse our data in such ways as are clearly undertaken to skirt legal proscriptions against availing PII to such corporate knaves is all the reason necessary to end legal fictions altogether, IMHO.
The posture of innocence taken by the agents of such outright lies is one of their features that sticks most in my craw.
This is also why I don't carry a phone, ever.
Yeah I had to go to my doctor today because I really strained some muscles a few months ago and can't seem to work it out. I handed them a cease and desist letter in any electronic transfer of my medical information. I went to a specialist and the doctor said "I see you were at your doctor in February" that, along with the call I got from "All Of Us" to join their study I was like enough is enough. I just told them that the only thing the specialist should have been doing was sending my doctor a report on being there and it was not the specialist business to be concerned with anything other than what I am there for and that nobody granted the specialist building to share my name and phone number to ask to join a study since I was coming to the building. The reception who took the letter faxed it over to the records department and said she totally agreed with me. I didn't do the All Of Us study basically for the same reason, I would have had to grant them the right to share my health information without identifiers to health professionals across the country who were working in collaboration on the study. I just didn't feel comfortable with that. Thanks.
That's all you can do, but you did all you can do.
Thanks!