On August 14, the president of Brazil signed the Brazilian General Data Protection Law (LGPD) into law. It will become effective on Valentine’s Day 2020. The elements of the new law are similar to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Continue reading “Brazil Adopts New Privacy Law Similar to GDPR”
India has released the much-anticipated first draft of the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018, the country’s first comprehensive data protection regulation. The proposed bill is currently under review by India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and will likely be introduced in Parliament this year.
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Technology that determines an individual’s identity or location has been the subject of significant media attention in the first half of 2018: Amazon made news with the sale of its facial recognition technology to law enforcement, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government generally must obtain a warrant to access certain types of geolocation information, California arrested the Golden State Killer using the DNA information of a relative, and Facebook came under fire for the way in which Cambridge Analytica accessed the data of tens of millions of users. Garnering less attention, but of no less importance, are the legislative efforts underway in the federal government and in many states to regulate these emerging technologies and limit the ways in which this information can be collected.
The Federal Trade Commission has opened up public comments for their upcoming Hearings on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century.
The hearings will take place during the fall and winter 2018 and will examine “whether broad-based changes in the economy, evolving business practices, new technologies, or international developments might require adjustments to competition and consumer protection enforcement law, enforcement priorities, and policy,” according to the FTC website. FTC Chairman Joe Simons said in a statement that the hearings are modeled after former Chairman Bob Pitofsky’s 1995 Global Competition and Innovation Hearings, which at the time “re-energized one of the FTC’s most valuable functions – to gather leaders in business, economics, law, and related disciplines to discuss tough, emerging problems and prepare public reports on the facts, issues, governing law, and the need, as appropriate, for change.”
An error made by a transcription service provider during a software upgrade on Orlando Orthopaedic Center (OOC)’s server in December 2017 has resulted in the exposure of more than 19,000 patients’ protected health information (PHI). PHI stored on OOC’s server from December 2017 until February 2018 – when the breach was finally discovered – was freely exposed over the internet without any authentication. Upon full investigation, patients’ names, social security numbers, dates of birth, insurance information, employer details, and treatment types were deemed accessible.
Continue reading “Business Associate Exposes Protected Health Information of 19,000 Patients”
Health care technology, particularly digital medicine, promises great new capabilities that will improve outcomes and reduce overall costs and time constraints. Digital medicine encompasses a broad-range of technologies, from technologies used to record, retain, and manipulate health data (i.e., Electronic Health Records aka., EHRs) and thereby make it more useable and amenable to analysis; to actual tools in clinical care (i.e., medical imaging, wearable sensors) that can measure physiological parameters or patient activity and facilitate clinical care and decision-making.
Continue reading “Digital Medicine: Health Care Providers’ Side of the Story”
