IS YOUR OBAMACARE DATA SAFE?
Excerpted from New York Times, January 25, 2015
If you’re concerned about online privacy, you’ve likely read a lot about what happens to the information you enter into sites like Facebook or Google. But now another website is generating privacy worries: Healthcare.gov.
Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Jack Gillum at The Associated Press report that the health insurance site has been sharing user data – possibly including characteristics like users’ age and income, as well as whether they’re pregnant – with companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook. They write that “there is no evidence that personal information has been misused”, and that the administration says it has prohibited companies “from using the data to further their own business interests.” Still, they note, many find the practice troubling.
According to Dr. Hartzog, a law professor at Samford University who studies privacy says that “what government is engaging in here, if indeed they’re sharing anonymized data according to certain kinds of industry standards:, is in fact “common practice for lots of different websites, if not most websites,”
“Consumers should be concerned not just because it’s happening at Healthcare.gov but because it’s happening everywhere.”