By:Sara Gerke, Carmel Shachar, Peter R. Chai & I. Glenn Cohen
Published in Nature Medicine Journal
Published: 07 August 2020
Classification of home
Best fundamental ethical practices for privacy
Home monitoring technologies represent a new and potentially problematic incursion into the privacy of people. Because of the heightened privacy expectations, especially in the users’ home, it is important that technology companies, healthcare providers, and public-health officials operate with the highest ethical standards, in particular when the existing privacy regulations do not apply. This includes the utilization of anonymized data whenever possible (and otherwise preferably with people’s consent) and having safeguards in place for re-identification risk41. In general, people should be given the choice to use home monitoring technologies and should be expressly asked to ‘opt in’. They should also be able to ‘opt out’ and to stop sharing their home monitoring data at any time. Further, all people in the USA should have a ‘right to be forgotten’ similar to the one in the EU GDPR, whereby people can usually request the erasure of their personal data (Article 17), and the CCPA (California Civil Code § 1798.105(a)). To avoid undermining data analysis efforts and to keep governance of these technologies similar to the CCPA, the right to be forgotten should be limited to personal information and should not be extended to de-identified or aggregate consumer information (California Civil Code § 1798.140(o)).
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0994-1
Summary: Privacy is incredibly important when collecting data of a person’s health. Some of the regulations already in place are listed in this article. I think it is crucial to protect the patient’s information from being used against them in any way, so I will have to be proactive about the potential harm that could come.
