Privacy laws need updating after Google deal with HCA Healthcare, medical ethics professor says; CNBC, May 26, 2021

Emily DeCiccio, CNBC; Privacy laws need updating after Google deal with HCA Healthcare, medical ethics professor says

"Privacy laws in the U.S. need to be updated, especially after Google struck a deal with a major hospital chain, medical ethics expert Arthur Kaplan said Wednesday.

“Now we’ve got electronic medical records, huge volumes of data, and this is like asking a navigation system from a World War I airplane to navigate us up to the space shuttle,” Kaplan, a professor at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, told “The News with Shepard Smith.” “We’ve got to update our privacy protection and our informed consent requirements.”

On Wednesday, Google’s cloud unit and hospital chain HCA Healthcare announced a deal that — according to The Wall Street Journal — gives Google access to patient records. The tech giant said it will use that to make algorithms to monitor patients and help doctors make better decisions."

Hackers Are Breaking into Medical Databases to Protect Patient Data; The Scientist, October 1, 2018

Catherine Offord, The Scientist; Hackers Are Breaking into Medical Databases to Protect Patient Data

"The first few times Ben Sadeghipour hacked into a computer, it was to access the video games on his older brother’s desktop. “He would usually have a password on his computer, and I would try and guess his password,” Sadeghipour tells The Scientist. Sometimes he’d guess right. Other times, he wouldn’t. “So I got into learning about how to get into computers that were password protected,” he says. “At the time, I had no clue that what I was doing was considered hacking.”

The skills he picked up back then would become unexpectedly useful later in life. Sadeghipour now breaks into other people’s computer systems as a profession. He is one of thousands of so-called ethical hackers working for HackerOne, a company that provides services to institutions and businesses looking to test the security of their systems and identify vulnerabilities before criminals do."

The Ethics of Hunting Down ‘Patient Zero’; New York Times, 10/29/16

Donald G. McNeil Jr., New York Times; The Ethics of Hunting Down ‘Patient Zero’ :

"The alleged “Patient Zero” of the American AIDS epidemic — a French Canadian flight attendant named Gaétan Dugas, who died of AIDS in 1984 — was exonerated last week.

Genetic sequencing of blood samples stored since the 1970s showed that the strain infecting him had circulated among gay men in New York for several years before he arrived here in 1974...

Decisions about whether to find index patients, to release details like age or race or sexual or hygiene habits, and ultimately whether to name them, “are all about the need to know,” Dr. Darrow said. “You weigh the potential harm against the potential benefit.”"

Oxford professor calls for European ethical codes on patient data; Guardian, 4/12/16

Paul Hill, Guardian; Oxford professor calls for European ethical codes on patient data:

"Prof Luciano Floridi, director of research at Oxford University’s Internet Institute believes the time has come for new European ethical codes to govern “data donation” and its use for medical research.

He says debate in Europe over individual privacy versus societal benefits of shared data has been “swinging like a pendulum between two extremes”. Medical research with big data should be part of the future of Europe, according to Floridi, “not something we need to export to other countries because it is not do-able here”.

“The patient has to be informed and willing to share the information that researchers are collecting – for the benefit of the patient and anyone else affected by the same problems,” said Floridi, who is also chair of the Ethics Advisory Board of the European Medical Information Framework, the largest EU project on the unification of biomedical databases...

Floridi, who has advised Google on the ethics of information and the right to be forgotten, proposes the creation of two new ethical codes.

The first would govern the use and re-use of biomedical data in Europe – an ethical code from the practitioners’ perspective.

The second would relate to “data donation” and the informed choice of an individual to share personal information for research."