None of this technically violates the health insurance portability and accountability act, or Hipaa, Tanner writes. But the techniques do render the protections of Hipaa largely toothless. “Data scientists can now circumvent Hipaa’s privacy protections by making very sophisticated guesses, marrying anonymized patient dossiers with named consumer profiles available elsewhere – with a surprising degree of accuracy,” says the study.
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The legal right of businesses to harvest and sell the information of individual patients without their permission has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to a case in which conservative justices ruled in favor of IMS Health and against the attorney general of Vermont. In 2011, the high court struck down a Vermont law restricting the sale, disclosure, and use of records that revealed the prescribing practices of individual doctors, ruling that corporations’ right to free speech trumped individuals’ right to privacy.
