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You Agreed to What? Doctor Check-In Software Harvests Your Health Data
The doctor will sell you now. Your intimate health information may not be as private as you think if you don’t look carefully at the forms you sign at the doctor’s office. There’s a burgeoning business in harvesting our patient data to target us with ultra-personalized ads. Patients who think medical information should come from a doctor — rather than a pharmaceutical marketing department — might not like that.
Here’s what’s going on: A company called Phreesia makes software used by more than 2,000 clinics and hospitals across the United States to streamline check-ins, replacing the clipboard and photocopied forms with screens on a website or app. The company says it was used for more than 100 million check-ins in the past year.
Phreesia says it does not “sell” your data. Instead, Phreesia mines your data and uses it to target you with ads on its own system without passing the information to others. (That’s a privacy argument I also often hear from Facebook and Google.) Phreesia also says it doesn’t track you in other digital places, and consenting won’t result in you seeing eerily targeted ads on other websites and apps.
Phreesia is not the only medical-data business that wants access to your records to show you ads. I’ve also investigated “patient portals” used by many doctors that, if you read the small print in their privacy policies, claim the right to your information to show you ads.
A Hacked Kaiser Permanente Employee’s Emails Led to Breach of 70,000 Patient Records
Kaiser Permanente, the largest nonprofit health plan provider in the United States, has disclosed a data breach that exposed the sensitive health information of almost 70,000 patients.
In a notice to patients on June 3, Kaiser revealed that someone gained access to an employee’s emails at the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Washington on April 5 that contained protected health information — including patient names, dates of service, medical record numbers and lab test result information. Financially sensitive information, including social security and credit card numbers, was not exposed by the breach, according to the healthcare provider.
Although the company didn’t reveal the scale of the breach, a separate filing with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services confirmed that 69,589 individuals were affected.
It is unclear why it took Kaiser almost two months to inform patients affected by the breach.
After Rogan COVID Controversy, Spotify Forms a Safety Council to Rethink Its Content Moderation Policies
After finding itself embroiled in a lengthy saga over how its star podcaster Joe Rogan spread COVID-19 vaccine-related misinformation on his show earlier this year, Spotify has announced a new initiative that could help it in situations like these in the future.
It has formed a Safety Advisory Council, with the aim of making better decisions about content moderation and more generally forming new policies related to that.
Spotify’s also aiming to experiment with things like live audio and text-to-speech AI, and the external body will be looking at the firm’s policy in these emerging areas, too.
The Safety Advisory Council won’t make decisions about specific content or creators. So you can’t appeal Spotify’s decision on a particular incident. This is in contrast to the Facebook Oversight Board, which advises the company on specific content takedown decisions and policies around those.
Canada to Suspend Vaccine Mandates for Domestic Travel, Civil Service — Source
Canada will suspend its requirement to be vaccinated against COVID-19 for domestic travel and to work in the civil service, a government source said on Tuesday, after provinces lifted most health restrictions in recent months.
The mandates may be reinstated later, especially in the case of a surge of a new variant, the source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said. International travelers coming to Canada still will be required to show proof of vaccination.
Unvaccinated people departing from Canada will be allowed to travel, the source said.
Meta Rolls out New Parental Controls for Instagram and Quest VR Headsets
Meta announced today that it’s rolling out new tools on Instagram and Quest VR headsets that are designed to give parents additional supervision controls. On Instagram, parents and guardians can now send invitations to their teens to initiate supervision tools. Prior to this change, only teens could send invitations. Parents and guardians can now also set specific times during the day or week when they would like to limit their teen’s Instagram usage.
With this new update, parents and guardians will also be able to see more information when their teen reports an account or post, including who was reported and the type of report. Meta notes that if you already have supervision set up on Instagram in the United States, these updates are now available.
In addition to the new parental controls, Instagram is rolling out “nudges” that will encourage teens to switch to a different topic if they’re repeatedly looking at the same type of content on the Explore page. Meta says the new nudge is designed to encourage teens to discover something new and “excludes certain topics that may be associated with appearance comparison.”
Advocates Call on Congress to Bolster Protections for Kids in Privacy Bill
On Tuesday, House lawmakers will hold a legislative hearing on the American Data Privacy and Protection Act, a recently unveiled draft privacy bill that marked the biggest breakthrough for efforts to pass a federal law in years. The proposal includes a number of provisions aimed at safeguarding children’s data in particular, including a ban on targeted advertising.
The proposal has drawn praise from a broad coalition of groups, including tech trade associations such as TechNet and children’s safety groups like Fairplay, even as many have called for at-times conflicting changes to the legislation.
But many kids’ privacy advocates are sounding the alarm that the bill contains major loopholes, which could help tech companies like YouTube and Instagram dodge accountability.
Currently, the proposal would prohibit companies from serving targeted ads to users if they have “actual knowledge” that they are under 17.
Religious Watchdog Groups Warn Secular Society Causing ‘Self-Censorship’ Among Christians
Christians are practicing “various forms of self-censorship” and find it increasingly difficult to express their faith freely even in countries that have historically been Christian, according to a new study from religious watchdog groups.
The report, titled “Perceptions on Self-Censorship: Confirming and Understanding the ‘Chilling Effect’,” was compiled by the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians (OIDAC) in Europe, the OIDAC in Latin America and the International Institute for Religious Freedom.
The data is based on “unstructured interviews” with people who have experienced what the report calls “the chilling effect” by which Christians self-censor about their faith, even unwittingly.
Madeleine Enzelberger, executive director of OIDAC Europe, told Christian Today that the study “raises the legitimate question of: how is it possible in a mature, liberal democratic society that stands for tolerance, diversity, and inclusive and open discourse, that people are frightened to freely speak their minds?”
Policy Expert: One More Reason to Abandon High-Tech Period-Tracker Apps
The leaked majority ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has sounded alarms about the future of reproductive rights in the United States.
Among the concerns raised are privacy risks associated with using period-tracking apps, and whether the data they amass — detailed entries by people about myriad aspects of their menstrual cycles — can be exploited by law enforcement or private actors in states where abortion and even pregnancy outcomes are criminalized.
Legal experts acknowledge that period-tracking apps indeed pose a potential hazard for users, even when companies tout stringent privacy protocols. Some recommend opting instead for a simple pen and paper calendar.
Apple and Google Are Coming for Your Car
We may have gotten a sneak peek at the long-rumored, long-awaited Apple Car when the company unveiled the next generation of its CarPlay feature at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. The new CarPlay, due to be released next year, will essentially turn your car’s dashboard into a giant iPhone.
If you love Apple products (and cars), this was probably a thrilling announcement. But antitrust advocates and lawmakers who believe Big Tech already has too much power over too many aspects of American life feel differently.
Google and Apple have been moving into cars for nearly a decade now, from powering dashboards and infotainment systems to building autonomous and electric vehicles. As cars have become, essentially, giant computers, it stands to reason that the tech companies that make smaller computers would want to (and be able to) capitalize on that.
As an added bonus, it’s an opportunity for them to attract new customers to their digital ecosystems — which then makes it much harder for companies that don’t have those ecosystems to compete — and get that much more data on where we go and what we do. That data then gives those companies even more of a competitive advantage.
Meta, TikTok, Google and Twitter All Preparing to Sign on to New Misinformation Rules in Europe
Amid ongoing debate around the impact of misinformation shared online, and the role that social media, in particular, plays in the spread of false narratives, a new anti-disinformation push in Europe could play a big role in improving detection and response across the biggest digital media platforms.
As reported by The Financial Times, Meta, Twitter, Google, Microsoft and TikTok are all planning to sign on to an updated version of the EU’s ‘anti-disinformation code’, which will see the implementation of new requirements, and penalties, in dealing with misinformation.
The push would see an expansion of the tools currently used by social platforms to detect and remove misinformation, while it may also see a new body formed to set rules around what classifies as ‘misinformation’ in this context, which could take some of the onus on this off the platforms themselves.
Though that would also place more control into the hands of government-approved groups to determine what is and isn’t ‘fake news’ — which, as we’ve seen in some regions, can also be used to quell public dissent.
