Would you give up your HIPAA protections?
I came across an article on SiliconValley.com that Google has just launched a new service, Google Health. In a nutshell, Google is billing this as an aggregation service that allows you to pull your online health information from various sources into one place. It also allows you to keep your own medical journal for information not found in any of the other sources. When I first saw this, I thought it was another innovative idea. However, one of the points that really jumped out at me was that the terms of service says that Google is not a “covered entity” under HIPAA. This means that not only CAN they share your information with other parties, they can do so in a means that doesn’t protect this information from Joe Hacker. In the spirit of not duplicating this, I’ll refer you to a ZDNet article that details this. Now, to the defense of Google, the Google Public Policy Blog (likely in response to the various articles on this topic) does go through to explain that Google will protect your information. However, if this is the case, then I personally wish they’d clean up their Usage Agreement. Now, perhaps it’s because I’m very security minded from my job, but I personally think I’ll stay 10 feet away from this Google product. What about you? Would you put your information in Google Health?
Technorati Tags: Google Health, HIPAA
