Consumer Privacy

Health privacy — The World Privacy Forum filed comments today about how medical records and other health information is intersecting with online advertising and online activities. The WPF comments were filed with the Department of Health and Human Services in response to its request for comments on personal health records, privacy, and social media.

LifeLock — The Federal Trade Commission began sending checks to almost a million consumers who were subscribers to the LifeLock ID theft protection service. LifeLock agreed to pay fines of $11 million to the FTC and $1 million to a group of state attorneys generals to settle charges that had been made against the company. Consumers with questions about this distribution may call 888-288-0783 or see the FTC’s web page on this, http://www.ftc.gov/refunds.

Online privacy — The FTC sent a letter to Google today expressing concern about the company’s privacy practices, but at the same time, the FTC informed Google that it was dropping its investigation of the Street View WiFi case. The FTC wrote: “FTC staff has concerns about the internal policies and procedures that gave rise to this data collection. … the company did not discover that it had been collecting payload data until it responded to a request for information from a data protection authority.” The FTC told Google it should develop and implement procedures to properly collect, dispose of, and maintain information.

Resource | case file — Amazon.com filed a lawsuit in April to fight the North Carolina Department of Revenue’s request for detailed information on Amazon.com customers. The North Carolina tax department requested Amazon.com to hand over “all information for all sales to customers with a North Carolina shipping address” between 2003 to 2010. In the decision, Seattle, Washington U.S. District Court Judge Marsha J. Pechman wrote, “Citizens are entitled to receive information and ideas through books, films, and other expressive materials anonymously.” She also stated that “The fear of government tracking and censoring one\’s reading, listening, and viewing choices chills the exercise of First Amendment rights.” This is an important decision for privacy rights, and online privacy in particular.

Health privacy and HIPAA — The World Privacy Forum filed two sets of detailed regulatory comments on recently proposed changes to HIPAA. The first comments focused on proposed changes to HIPAA in the area of marketing patient information. The proposed changes would be harmful to patient privacy, and are contrary to the law. WPF was joined in the marketing comments by the Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy Activism, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and Privacy Times. The second set of comments WPF filed included the comments on marketing as well as on additional provisions that would be problematic if enacted.