Michele W. Berger
One day a few years back, Penn emergency medicine physician Ari Friedman decided to see what would happen if he declined third-party cookies on a medical journal website. “I’d read enough about privacy and leaks and what was going on with the data that I wanted to turn them off,” says Friedman.
Not only couldn’t he access the journal article he sought, but he couldn’t even get to the issue’s table of contents. “I was shocked,” he says. “I still have a lot of idealism around academia, and that felt antithetical to the mission of these journals, which is to share knowledge.”
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Out of that grew the Penn-CMU Digital Health Privacy Initiative, which Friedman now runs with Penn Medicine’s Matthew McCoy and Lujo Bauer, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. Funded by the Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN), facilitated at Penn by the SNF Paideia Program, the initiative aims to pinpoint precisely how the routine collection of non-health data might inadvertently reveal a person’s health profile and what implications this has for a range of areas, from insurance coverage to credit scores.
Read more at PennToday.