Accessing Medical Files Over P2P Networks

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday February 28, 2009 @02:18AM from the doctor-patient-entire-internet-confidentiality dept.

Gov IT writes with this excerpt from NextGov: "Just days after President Obama signed a law giving billions of dollars to develop electronic health records, a university technology professor submitted a paper showing that he was able to uncover tens of thousands of medical files containing names, addresses and Social Security numbers for patients seeking treatment for conditions ranging from AIDS to mental health problems. ... The basic technology that runs peer-to-peer networks inadvertently exposed the files probably without the computer user's knowledge, Johnson said. A health care worker might have loaded patient files onto a laptop, for example, and taken it home where a son or daughter could have downloaded a peer-to-peer client onto the laptop to share music."

1 of 137 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:P2P?! Oh no! by bonch · 2009-02-28 08:20 · Score: 0, Troll

I grant that it is expensive though. I also grant that governments are bad at large IT projects and always give it to the lowest bidder.
Seems like you just tore down your own argument here...
The problem isn't the idea of an electronic system. The problem is the government being involved. Governments fuck things up, constantly. Obama seems to be a big government guy. This scares me.