The Ethics of Hiding Your Data From the Machines; Wired, August 22, 2019

Molly Wood, Wired;

The Ethics of Hiding Your Data From the Machines

"In the case of the company I met with, the data collection they’re doing is all good. They want every participant in their longitudinal labor study to opt in, and to be fully informed about what’s going to happen with the data about this most precious and scary and personal time in their lives.

But when I ask what’s going to happen if their company is ever sold, they go a little quiet."

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."

Your private medical data is for sale – and it's driving a business worth billions; Guardian, 1/10/17

Sam Thielman, Guardian; 

Your private medical data is for sale – and it's driving a business worth billions:

"Your medical data is for sale – all of it. Adam Tanner, a fellow at Harvard’s institute for quantitative social science and author of a new book on the topic, Our Bodies, Our Data, said that patients generally don’t know that their most personal information – what diseases they test positive for, what surgeries they have had – is the stuff of multibillion-dollar business.

But although the data is nominally stripped of personally identifying information, data miners and brokers are working tirelessly to aggregate detailed dossiers on individual patients; the patients are merely called “24601” instead of “Jean Valjean”."