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Can We Abandon Confidentiality For Google Apps?
An anonymous reader writes "I provide IT services for medium-sized medical and law practices. Lately I have been getting a lot of feedback from doctors and lawyers who use gmail at home and believe that they can run a significant portion of their practice IT on Google Apps. From a support standpoint, I'd be happy to chuck mail/calendar service management into the bin and let them run with gmail, but for these businesses, there is significant legal liability associated with the confidentiality of their communications and records (e.g., HIPAA). For those with high-profile celebrity clients, simply telling them 'Google employees can read your stuff' will usually end the conversation right there. But for smaller practices, I often get a lot of push-back in the form of 'What's wrong with trusting Google?' and 'Google's not interested in our email/calendar.' Weighing what they see as a tiny legal risk against the promise of Free IT Stuff(TM) becomes increasingly lopsided given the clear functionality / usability / ubiquity that they experience when using Google at home. So my question to the Slashdot community is: Are they right? Is it time for me to remove the Tin Foil Hat on the subject of confidentiality and stop resisting the juggernaut that is Google? If not, what is the best way to clarify the confidentiality issues for these clients?"
..the google apps contract is fine. IAAL and i use google apps for all my stuff. i DO maintain a separate backup but everything goes on google. the bar is also fine with it.
As a Paramedic, I can say that HIPPA is extremely strict and will, if violated, force your license to be questioned as well as cause fines to be pushed your way. Honestly, doing ANYTHING outside of a secured network or a patient care medium (i.e. Pyxis, Temsis) with privileged, confidential information will plant a bullseye on your back. It is just not worth risking it. I can guarantee that an expert data thief is going to be more skilled and knowledgeable at computers and networking than any physician I know.
Amazon published a white paper about using their AWS platform with HIPAA compient applications: basic idea is to keep data encrypted until it is in memory, and encrypt it again before writing to persistent storage.
For Google Apps, how about using rich clients that decrypt data for viewing/editing, and encrypt it again before storing back on big table, etc.
Perhaps Google themselves would implement this as browser plugins?
We are a contractor for the Veterans administration. The VA insists that we comply with privacy issues strictly. Any communications that have patient information must be sent on encrypted secure systems. No open email servers/hotmail/gmail/whatever is allowed. Failure to comply with the privacy (detailed in the out of control HIPAA set of rules and standards) is punishable both financially and by being banned from contracting with the US federal government. As an administrator, I have to remind physicians that if they are caught transmitting identifiable information of our patients over unsecured channels, it may cost us our contract and may result in their being banned from seeing medicare/medicaid patients. Anyhow, that's my two cents on utilizing gmail or such for sensitive information.
Not only did you not read TFA, but you did not even read the summary. Laziness has nothing to do with this at all. He is getting a lot of friction from his clients that don't understand HIS reservations about doing business with Google in this manner. He is concerned for their legal liability. Sounds like an IT guy that actually cares.
His question being posed to the /. community, is whether or not his clients have a point. Can we really trust Google with data that must remain confidential. Can he recommend Google services to his clients without fearing for liability later down the road.
Yeah, that sounds lazy to me....
I dislike MS as much as the next /.er but if your company allows your Exchange server to call home to Microsoft, for anything other than patching, your network admin needs to be fired.
No matter how ironclad the agreement or how draconian the penalties your data will still be public. Sue Google into non existence and well your data is still public.
Without physical security there is no security.
If you don't own the box and control access yourself there is no physical security.
Since HIPAA doesn't create a private cause of action for violations, only the federal government can enforce HIPAA rules generally (sometimes, under state laws, the fact that a disclosure is in violation of a federal law like HIPAA, or of a assurance or agreement mandated by HIPAA, may, with other factors, meet the standard for some private cause of action under state law, but the action won't be for a HIPAA violation, per se.) To date, AFAIK, none of the HIPAA complaints received by the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Civil Rights (which enforces HIPAA) have resulted in monetary penalties being assessed, but most of them do result in OCR requiring business practice changes on the part of the entity against whom the complaint was lodged. A few do get referred to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution, though I believe that, to date, no prosecutions have been made on HIPAA charges alone (sometimes HIPAA charges have been part of a broader criminal complaint.)
There was a time when that was at least generally true (where a business associate of a HIPAA covered entity might not be liable the way a covered entity was if it was not itself a covered entity), however, the recently passed HITECH Act (part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 [ARRA], Pub.L. 111-5) both added additional security requirements that apply to HIPAA covered entities and extended both the existing and new security requirements on HIPAA covered entities, including the civil and criminal penalties for violations, to apply to those entities' business associates to the same extent as to covered entities themselves. (see ARRA, Title XIII, Subtitle D, Sec. 13401; codified at 42 U.S.C. Sec. 17931.)
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