This video is part 3 of a 14-part WPF video series on health privacy and health information exchanges. Many patients may be surprised to learn that a health care provider does not need your permission to share your medical information for treatment purposes within an HIE, just as a doctor does not need permission to send your records via fax to another doctor for treatment purposes. This is true even if your health record is going to a doctor you have never met before. See more ….

To score is human. Ranking individuals by grades and other performance numbers is as old as human society. Consumer scores — numbers given to individuals to describe or predict their characteristics, habits, or predilections — are a modern day numeric shorthand that ranks, separates, sifts, and otherwise categorizes individuals and also predicts their potential future actions. This new report by Pam Dixon and Robert Gellman explores this issue of predictive scores and privacy.

Chairman Rockefeller and Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today about data brokers, an industry that is often hidden from public view, and the impact of data brokers on consumers’ lives.

  What is a security freeze? A security freeze (sometimes called a credit freeze) lets you stop the disclosure of your credit report by a credit bureau. Currently, the three credit bureaus are allowing all consumers nationwide to set a security freeze for a fee. All states have specific security freeze laws; a list of states with security

About Behaviorally targeted advertising, World Privacy Forum testimony, comments and resources   What is “behaviorally targeted advertising”? Not all online advertising is inherently bad. In its generic forms, WPF views online advertising issues as generally lower on the privacy score card than for example, data broker privacy intrusions. The World Privacy Forum has no complaint