Quote:Quick anecdote:  I finally got sick enough to go to the gastroenterologist.  One of my neighbors growing up is a prominent one in town, and both he and his wife were family friends when I lived in town.  I went to see him, and he was stoked.  He said he'd tell his wife he ran into me.  Then he quickly corrected himself, "no, I won't."

 

Privacy laws are serious.

I dealt with HIPAA pretty extensively when I worked for a large health insurance provider.  When we'd underwrite the clients, we had to have access to their medical information.  We had to be cleared to be allowed to review the information, and the system that we used during the underwriting process was chalked full of security.  When we did data transfers to upload information to the mainframe, again those jobs were all high security, and the data was fully encrypted.  That data was treated like state secrets because every violation of HIPAA carried a hefty fine.  I don't know what it is today, but it was something like $25k per violation at the time, and that's going back 15+ years.

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