data security

Along with the development this week that Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff called off a state dinner in Washington over the National Security Agency's alleged spying on her and a Brazilian energy company, Brazil also is considering new Internet laws, the Wall Street Journal's Digits Blog reports. One of the proposals would require Internet firms to store data about Brazilians in Brazil, the blog reports, to give "the Brazilian government more control over Internet data, and Brazilian courts would more easily be able to issue orders for access to information about Brazilian users of services from foreign companies." Iit would be very difficult to enforce such a law in the globalized world in which people cross borders almost as easily as data does.

The ACLU has raised concerns that the Alaskan Health Information Exchange for sharing electronic health records is not secure against hackers and governemental intrusion by the NSA. For example, the ACLU opined: "Let’s be clear: electronic medical records can be a good thing. They can improve our health and make it easier for doctors to care for us. But a medical exchange that isn’t secure against spies and hackers is bad for Alaskans." The full OP/ED can be read here: http://m.newsminer.com/opinion/community_perspectives/risky-electronic-h...

But healthcare providers hit back, arguing the exchange is secure and that penalties for not ensuring patient privacy are high.

Electronic health records are going to become more and more prevalent as the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services have offered payments to health-care providers to implement EHRS with 'meaningful use': http://www.healthit.gov/policy-researchers-implementers/meaningful-use

But with this new way of managing patient information and records comes likely problems, including medical identity theft. Gigaom reports on a survey that finds that medical identity theft is rising:

"According to a new survey from the Ponemon Institute, an independent group that focuses on privacy and data security, medical identity theft is on the rise: since 2012, the number of people affected by medical identity theft has increased nearly 20 percent. The survey, which was sponsored by the Medical Identity Fraud Alliance and ID Experts, found that a total of about 1.84 million people in the U.S. have been affected."