Phil Bradley-Schmieg writes: The UK Government has opened a consultation, running until September 7, 2016, regarding how UK National Health Service (NHS) patient data should be safeguarded, and how it could be used for purposes other than direct care (e.g. scientific research). The consultation comes after two parallel-track reviews of information governance and data security arrangements in…
Category: Healthcare
Protecting privacy in genomic databases
From the MIT News Office: Genome-wide association studies, which try to find correlations between particular genetic variations and disease diagnoses, are a staple of modern medical research. But because they depend on databases that contain people’s medical histories, they carry privacy risks. An attacker armed with genetic information about someone — from, say, a skin…
Would you give a urine sample to govt because… ZIKA?
Do the public health consequences warrant this government action? And what are the privacy protections and data destruction conditions? Joe Cadillic sends these along: “Officials believe the local transmission is confined to a small area north of downtown Miami within a single ZIP code. However, local, state and federal health officials are continuing their investigation,…
Pregnancy-tracking app was riddled with vulnerabilities, exposing extremely sensitive personal information
Cory Doctorow reports: Consumer Reports Labs tested Glow, a very popular menstrual cycle/fertility-tracking app, and found that the app’s designers had made a number of fundamental errors in the security and privacy design of the app, which would make it easy for stalkers or griefers to take over the app, change users’ passwords, spy on them,…