This appeared last week:
Opt-out e-health a 'fundamental breach of trust': Victorian regulator
Can we trust governments to preserve our privacy when they put economics ahead of basic principles like self-determination? Trust is the key, say privacy experts.
The Australian government has committed a "fundamental breach of trust" by flipping personally controlled e-health records (PCEHR) from an opt-in system to opt-out, according to Victoria's Commissioner for Privacy and Data Protection, David Watts.
"I actually designed the regulatory system for e-health in Australia, and I swore black and blue ... that we would never be an opt-out system, and always be an opt-in. And of course it's now an opt-out system in order to drive take-up of e-health, because AU$4 billion had been spent on it and very few people had registered," Watts told the Australian Internet Industry Association (AIIA) Navigating Privacy and Security Summit in Canberra on Tuesday.
"In my view that's a fundamental breach of trust."
Watts said it puts simple economics ahead of information self-determination.
"It says something about trust across government that those sorts of principles would be thrown away simply because a system's not been used as much as it should be."
…..
But consent is a particularly American concern, according to Constellation Research privacy consultant Steve Wilson, who was in the AIIA Summit audience.
"Consent is not the only or even most important issue," Wilson told ZDNet on Wednesday.
"The rest of the world doesn't obsess about consent. But consent is all they've got in America, absent any overarching data protection restraint, so they obsess about whether or not 5,000-word privacy policies are enforceable as informed consent," he said.
Wilson said that in general the community trusts the government to adhere to core privacy principles, such as not repurposing information without due cause, and our day-to-day experience is good in that regard.
In Australia, for example, we trust Medicare with highly-sensitive healthcare metadata -- but e-health records contain clinical data, and that's a different ball game.
"Some cynics say that the government isn't organised enough to share data, even if they wanted to. But health data has so many borderline use cases that there's a strong temptation to reuse it. If there's any uncertainty about how the government might handle those cases, then trust starts to erode," Wilson said.
"It's nice to trust, but it's better not to have to trust, and instead have clear rules and regulations."
Lots more here:
What a spectacular set of comments from Mr Watts. We all know - except for DoH - that dragooning citizens into an IT system and database they neither want or understand is pure folly, but this is what is happening right now to a million citizens - after the stupid belief that e-Health was good trumped parliamentary common-sense.
What a farce!
David.
2 comments:
It may soon come to pass that the shift to opt-out proves to be a 'courageous' political decision in an election year.
Quite frankly - the good people in the of North Qld and Nepean Blue Mountains PHN's will be relatively oblivious to the implications of these gov't initiatives. The only way they will ever have it come to their notice in a way that will allow them to stand and ask "What is going on here" is if the local / regional newspapers make a concerted effort to report on these shenanigan. That shouldn't be too hard for any self respecting journaislt capable of reviewing various blog entries and comments on HealthIT blogspot.
First step is 1. They need to know the aushealthIT blogspot exists (2)they need to be able to read, write and report.
Post a Comment