Conflicting rulings leave open debate on privacy protections for social network data

In June, we noted with interest a California federal district court ruling in Crispin v. Christian Audigier that provided an interpretation of the status of social networking sites under the Stored Communications Act (18 U.S.C. §121)…

Supreme Court to hear corporate challenge to FOIA based on “personal” privacy

The United States Supreme Court today granted a petition of certiorari filed by the federal government, seeking to overturn a ruling by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals that allowed AT&T to prevent the disclosure of…

Identity theft from hospital records violates more than HIPAA

HealthcareInfoSecurity.com‘s Howard Anderson and others last week covered an indictment filed in Pennsylvania against a man who allegedly used his authorized access (as a hospital employee) to patient records to steal names, dates of birth, social…

Health data privacy remains a key factor in slower U.S. adoption of EHRs

A newly released paper by four academic researchers comparing electronic health record adoption in the United States and European Union concludes that concerns over privacy of health record data remain the key obstacle to broader EHR…

Questions to consider about GPS data, location tracking, and privacy expectations

The previous post looked at some of the variable and as yet unresolved factors that may help determine how and under what circumstances GPS location data may be used for investigations by law enforcement personnel, with…

Can GPS be used to track your movements, without a warrant? That depends…

The 4th Amendment implications of location-based data have been a topic of active discussion, prompted in part by two recent federal Circuit Court rulings, and to a lesser degree by some outspoken opinions made both in…

Trustworthy organizations do what they should even in the absence of legal enforcement

Joseph Conn of Modern Healthcare called attention in a blog post yesterday to the almost complete absence of civil penalties imposed against violators of the HIPAA Security and Privacy rules, pointing out that without some credible…