Clearer definitions and roles for intermediaries would facilitate policy decisions on directed exchange of health data

During the latest meeting of the Health IT Privacy and Security tiger team today, the bulk of the discussion centered around draft recommendations for message handling in what the group calls “directed exchange” in which health…

Data encryption for HIE sounds obvious; not so simple to implement

One of the early themes that has emerged from the initial discussions of the Office of the National Coordinator’s privacy and security tiger team is the need for stronger protection of the confidentiality and privacy of…

Trusted computers are reliable, but that’s not the same thing as trustworthy

Trust in a security context normally means reliability or, in the identification and authentication context, authenticity. When the term trusted is applied to a system or capability, the same connotation conveys — that is, a trusted…

Supreme Court rules search of police officer’s text messages legal, opts not to try to resolve reasonable expectation of privacy issue

The U.S. Supreme Court handed down a unanimous ruling in Ontario v. Quon, reversing the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and finding that the City of Ontario (Calif.) Police Department (OPD) did not violate the 4th…

Building patient trust in EHRs can’t be about security controls

The emphasis on security and privacy in electronic health record (EHR) systems as a prerequisite for building consumer trust in these systems both overstates the extent to which security controls can in fact provide trust, and…

Prosecution of Maryland motorcyclist who recorded his traffic stop hinges on “reasonable expectation of privacy”

As reported in today’s Washington Post, a Maryland motorcyclist who used his helmet-mounted video camera to record the state trooper who stopped him and ticketed him for speeding, and then posted the video on YouTube, now…

In letter to Congress, Google says wireless data collection wasn’t the right thing to do, but didn’t break any laws

In response to a request from Congressmen Henry Waxman, Joe Barton, and Edward Markey to Google CEO Eric Schmidt seeking information about the collection of wireless network traffic by the company during the operation of its…