Much as this sort of thing makes me glad I don't need to purchase private health insurance, the article would be a lot more helpful if it distinguished more clearly between what is and isn't legal use of the data as well as between the Experians and Google Analytics of this world.
That said, the original source paper probably if any thing plays down the potential concerns, contending, for example that a URI like http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21722252 contains no symptom-specific information when any sufficiently motivated actor can write a scraper that links anonymous looking URIs on healthcare domains to conditions and symptoms referenced in the page content.
this sort of thing makes me glad I don't need to purchase private health insurance
Are you in the USA? Thanks to Obamacare your medical history doesn't matter anymore. I purchase my own insurance and only three things matter:
your age
your gender
the type of coverage (bronze, silver, gold, etc)
It doesn't even matter whether you're single or married or have kids. My family policy cost is exactly the sum of:
my policy cost based on age and gender
my wife's policy cost based on age and gender
each of my children's policy costs (I don't
remember if age or gender matter, I don't think
they do)
I generally don't like the idea of Obamacare, but in this case it did a lot of good. Before Obamacare, insurance companies went out of their way to simply not offer private coverage at all to people with any medical issues, even minor ones. They can't do that anymore.
Much as this sort of thing makes me glad I don't need to purchase private health insurance, the article would be a lot more helpful if it distinguished more clearly between what is and isn't legal use of the data as well as between the Experians and Google Analytics of this world.
That said, the original source paper probably if any thing plays down the potential concerns, contending, for example that a URI like http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21722252 contains no symptom-specific information when any sufficiently motivated actor can write a scraper that links anonymous looking URIs on healthcare domains to conditions and symptoms referenced in the page content.