Prescription Writing Records Ruled Confidential in NH

Article at CNN:
"A federal appeals court has upheld the constitutionality of New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation law making doctors' prescription writing habits confidential."

A New Text Scrubber

Researchers at the Regenstrief Institute in Indiana have developed a new rules-based clinical text scrubber for HL7-coded documents.

Article: Protecting patient privacy the new fashioned way

Paper: A software tool for removing patient identifying information from clinical documents

GAO on HHS Health IT

A new GAO report is calling on the HHS to define privacy mechanisms for emerge health information technologies.

Exposing Yourself via 23&me

(Thanks to John Paulett for the pointer)
Though it may be the obligatory publicity stunt, it's no less interesting that Sergei Brin has revealed his genetic predispositions via 23andme (NY Times story).

UK Monitoring + Storing Travel Records

Do you know where you've been every day for the past 5 years? No? Well, maybe you can ask the government, that is, if you live in the UK. Apparently, the UK has plans to record and stockpile license plate pictures from a bevy of roadside cameras around the country (and this cameras will be geocoded to location). They expect to capture 50 million pictures a day, which will be stored for five years (or more).

Is IP Traceback Coming?

Declan McCullagh reports that the U.N. is considering technical standards for "IP Traceback", which in the process of enabling traceability, will permit the uncovering of of the source of Internet communications. The goal would be to provide law enforcement agencies with the ability to determine the source(s) of crimes perpetrated over the Internet, such as denial of service attacks. Yet, at the same time, it would make it much easier to rescind anonymity protection mechanisms. Now, I'm not saying that the Chinese government would use it for suppression, but they are the ones that brought the proposal before the U.N...

The Estonian Genome Project (Public vs. Private)

The following paper is an interesting read on the issues in public versus private funding in Estonia's biobanking / genome project. It doesn't address the privacy issues, per se, but it's worth reading to learn about how such large scale projects have (and still are) unfolded and where the funding is coming from.

Rainer Kattel and Margit Suurna. The Rise and Fall of the Estonian Genome Project. Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology. 2008; 2(2): article 4.