The World Privacy Forum filed comments today with the US Customs and Border Protection agency regarding a proposal to request social media account information from arriving and departing travelers on entry/exit forms. WPF urged CBP to drop its proposal to request social media profile information from travelers on these key entry/exit forms. The entry forms in question

This coming Thursday, WPF Executive Director Pam Dixon will give a keynote speech on health privacy and security, “The New Healthcare Fraud Continuum.” Based on her latest research in health privacy, this talk will be Dixon’s first talk about the new fraud continuum, what it is, how it operates, what it means to providers and patients,

We have updated our popular Top Ten Opt Outs page for consumers. All of the links are fresh, and we have updated the text where it had gotten stale. I am frequently asked which of the opt outs is the most important. Really, that will depend on what is important for you. In general, though,

This new World Privacy Forum report reviews privacy law applicable to the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), and the large medical information and biospecimen database at its center. The HIPAA health privacy rule and its protections for individuals will not apply to PMI research activities. The key privacy concerns raised by the PMI are the lack of applicable law to govern its collection and use of individuals’ health data, the potential waiver of the patient-physician legal privilege that can shield data from disclosure through litigation, and the possibility of law enforcement access to patient records held in the PMI.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: San Diego — The World Privacy Forum today published a report finding that the Precision Medicine Initiative has laudable goals, but that many core privacy questions are unaddressed and unanswered. President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) is an ambitious program with a goal of gathering the freely volunteered health and biospecimen data of over a million people to facilitate medical research. According to World Privacy Forum’s analysis of the PMI documents and plans, the 1 million planned volunteers may be getting more exposure than they bargained for after they donate their medical records and biospecimens to the volunteer research effort.