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,…
Category: Healthcare
ONC Report to Congress Identifies Gaps in Oversight of Privacy and Security of mHealth Technologies and Health Social Media
Paige Jennings writes: Earlier this month the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), released a report to Congress highlighting “large gaps” in policies and oversight surrounding access to and security and privacy of health information held by certain “mHealth technologies” and “health social media.” mHealth…
Five myths about patient privacy
Healthcare professionals should know all this already, but there’s a well-written piece for the public on myths about what HIPAA does and does not do. One of the best lines in the piece, in my opinion, is that HIPAA was intended to be a valve, not a blockage. Come to think of it, maybe readers…
The Secret Documents That Detail How Patients’ Privacy is Breached
by Charles Ornstein ProPublica, July 21, 2016, 8 a.m. When the federal government takes the rare step of fining medical providers for violating the privacy and security of patients’ medical information, it issues a press release and posts details on the web. But thousands of times a year, the Office for Civil Rights of the…