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FTC: Online Billing Service Deceptively Collected Medical Records
itwbennett writes The FTC has reached a proposed settlement with PaymentsMD, an Atlanta health billing company that used the sign-up process for its billing service to surreptitiously seek customers' consent to obtain detailed medical information. The medical information PaymentsMD requested included customers' prescriptions, procedures, medical diagnoses, lab tests performed and their results, and other information, the FTC said. The bright spot in all this: In all but one case, the health care providers contacted for data refused to comply with PaymentsMD's requests.
I take it the one medical provider who had the major screwup of providing such personal and private data has had their license revoked and is now out of business?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Naturally. Those health care providers did not want any competition in selling their customers' data.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
It just seems to make sense to me that a payer of medical bills would collect information that would confirm the validity of the bills that they were paying. Sharing that aforesaid information is a totally different ball of wax though.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Under the proposed settlements, PaymentsMD and former CEO Hughes are banned from deceiving consumers about the way they collect and use information,
Yay! They are forbidden from doing what they are forbidden from doing, that will teach them a lesson!
It just seems to make sense to me that a payer of medical bills would collect information that would confirm the validity of the bills that they were paying. Sharing that aforesaid information is a totally different ball of wax though.
No. did you bother to read the very first paragraph?
An online service allowing consumers to pay their medical bills failed to adequately inform them that it would also try to collect highly detailed medical information |from their pharmacies, medical labs and insurance companies, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said.
They send out bills. Patients send them money. They send money to the doctor or hospital. They keep ledgers.
They don't need to know detailed medical information. They are acting as a billing agent for the doctor. They don't need to verify what the doctor did or what the patient had.
If PaymentMD is grabbing medical records, and telecoms are spying on their customers, and Uber is grabbing their location, apps they use, emails, SMSs and everything else in their mobile, its done for money.
On the one hand they know they can sell this data and make a healthy profit, on the other hand, they know the government is breaking all laws, lying in legal documents (parallel construction is perjury, the name tries to make it sound otherwise), so they really won't get punished.
So there is a market for your private data, and a government that is probably the biggest buyer in that market, and law makers are ineffective, because every time someone suggest privacy laws, the spooks scream "terrorists" to cover their asses.
It's like the wild-west all over again, only the Sheriff is the bad guy.
in selling their customers' data.
Someone in that company must have thought this is a good idea. Being in that line of business, they should have known that even with a user clicking on "consent", a health care provider giving them the information would be acting illegally. And then I wonder why did they want this information in the first place? You can't use it for anything that isn't again highly illegal.
Another indication that people have become the commodity, not the customer.
I can't believe that there was any legitimate reason to ever ask for this in the first place, meaning a few felonies have been committed. Hopefully the scumbags will be thrown in prison.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
An online service allowing consumers to pay their medical bills ... medical information it collected related to its separate online medical records service...
So, they used their foot in the door to get people to sign consent for them to collect information that they could then slide over to their side business that collects medical information about people. I didn't dig deep enough to find out what this side business does with the info it hordes but based on their method of collection, I would say "nothing good".