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Database Records and "In Plain Sight" Searches
chriswaco writes "A federal appeals court ruled that database records are not 'in plain sight' when other records in the same database are subpoenaed. The case involved Major League Baseball drug test results, but the implications are far wider."
Actually, it's called pointing out the significant information in the article. If you think this article is about baseball, you're not paying attention.
The Appeals court specifically indicated how this ruling should be applied to cases you'd probably be more interested in, such as if Google's servers were searched.
If anything, cnn.com is pandering to its audience by focusing on the baseball aspects of a story that's really about the legal bounds of search where databases are involved; and while the court reached its conclusion via a line of logic I don't care for (essentially an appeal to force - "if I decide this way, the consequences would be harmful, so I'll decide a different way"), it is a pro-privacy conclusion that a lot of folks around here are probably interested in.
But by all means, argue that the information shouldn't be made available here because it happens to come from a case that deals with sports and I suppose you think nerds don't do sports.
And the "A" stands for "Accountability" (which refers, in large part, to 'accountability for use of personal information'.) The major regulatorions under HIPAA include the Privacy Rule which controls use and disclosure of protected health information (PHI) by covered entities, the Security Rule which covers the required protection of electronic PHI held and communicated by covered entities, and the Transactions and Code Sets rule which establishes standards for how insurance-related transactions are conducted in electronic media. The first two of those rules are directed at protecting privacy.
HIPAA isn't all about privacy, but privacy protections are an important part of it (they were incorporated largely because privacy fears were one of the reasons people were resistant to the rest of the pieces aimed at acheiving efficiency by promoting and standardizing use of electronic transactions for health insurance billing and related activities.)