We learned early in life from the Three Little Pigs that a house made of straw or sticks, while much easier to build, lacks the safety and security of a brick house. This fable’s lesson applies to many scenarios including the recent rapid deployment of telehealth services. While a pandemic, not laziness, caused the hurried telehealth services implementation for many, that’s irrelevant to the big bad wolf (and there is always a big bad wolf). He will come and he will huff, and he will puff, and he will compromise the privacy of patient information in a system without adequate protections.
Category Archives: Privacy Laws
In Part I of this mini-series last week, Dayle A. Duran, Esq., CIPP/US articulately described Apple and Google’s COVID-19 contact tracing API. Overall, she concluded that, if used as intended, the technology provides good privacy protections, but flagged that the real privacy risks lie in unintended use and function creep. Recently proposed bipartisan legislation may adequately address these concerns.
This is part one of a two-part series focused on COVID-19 contact tracing technology and its implications for US privacy law. The next installment of this series will examine legislative solutions to protect data subjects from misuse of information collected through contact tracing apps and related technologies.
Consider the following: “It’s time to eat, Grandma!” versus “It’s time to eat Grandma!” Punctuation saves lives. It also potentially saved AT&T and Hilton many millions of dollars in two Telephone Consumer Protection Act suits.
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