Companies like Facebook will complain loudly that they won't be able to survive, but that is not our problem. If we pass legislation with teeth, they will need to change their business model. That would be the point.
I work with (adjacent industry) HIPAA protected data, which is considered PII by virtue of knowing Bob Smith is in the system. If they're under a BAA and sending that information to Facebook they're in violation.
If one of my sub-processors did this my lawyer would be livid. But hey, it's Silicon Valley, don't harsh their buzz man.
The specific scenario isn't the point - but the fact that a semi-obvious scenario could be incorrect sorta is. Regulations are complex and tech has a terrible history of playing fast and loose with regulations so it's not like an imposition of regulations would be inappropriate or unwarranted - there are good and bad apples, and the bad apples spoil the bunch.
Frankly I can't figure out why stalking a single person is illegal but stalking a billion people is considered good business.
Nope, they just have to want it to stop :)
Kaiser Permanente will contact google analytics and doubleclick as you navigate their website, even when checking test results and contacting your doctor.
It just has to be correlatable if I understood it correctly, but I don't know if unique or not. To me it sounded like if there's only a small number of possible people it could identify (say 4) then its potentially PII, however I have no idea where the line is drawn. Clearly if k is 1, its PII. If k is 2, it probably is too. If k is 1000, its probably not. But at what point does it stop being PII? I have no idea!
The legal person basically said "its complicated, anything can become PII when combined with something else, even if neither on their own are PII". The bottom line is does some combination of information identify a person, then its PII (its in the name really!), but unfortunately that means there is no clear simple list of things that are or aren't PII, it really depends on each individual case.
Her advice was to think carefully about any data stored about or for users and to avoid storing it if possible, and if not possible, think carefully about whether or not it could identify a user in some way. Its not a very satisfying answer, I know. It also doesn't answer your question :(
Moreover, Zoom has a history of RCEs (leaving an active web server after you uninstall Zoom? so that a website can reinstall Zoom without any user interaction? why not! https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/zoom-zero-day-4-million-...), and anti-privacy behavior: meeting host gets a copy of all private messages sent between participants (there is no notice of this; https://twitter.com/rcalo/status/1237957509324746752); host can monitor if your Zoom window is active (https://twitter.com/zoom_us/status/1241768006327336963); and Zoom has audio fingerprint tracing (so if you get a leaked recording Zoom can blame a particular participant: https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/22/zoom-is-bringing-ultrason...). Running it under strace reveals it is fingerprinting your device as well (idk if that gets sent anywhere but iOS app sends stuff to Facebook...).
Zoom is creepy and should not be used. I keep a separate VM for it, as it clearly can not be trusted.
Not a Zoom apologist I—I am also deeply creeped out by the fetish for covert data exfiltration in a platform that is so widely used in these quarantine days—but, as far as the tech goes, the story you linked seems to say that they do use WebRTC as of September 2019.
Zoom is obviously an extremely scummy company and I’d rather stay away from it entirely. Unfortunately they must be dumping cash into marketing because it’s now the biggest thing in video conferencing. It’s a shame, they now seem to have network effect going for them.
Click "no" on the invite when it asks to open zoom (instant if you dont have it installed) and underneath there is a link that goes to the web version.
How is that my fault?
If the health data they would otherwise use for that is "private" then that isn't allowed, so providing insurance is riskier, will have fewer competitors, and commands higher premiums.
It was created primarily to modernize the flow of healthcare information, stipulate how Personally Identifiable Information maintained by the healthcare and healthcare insurance industries should be protected from fraud and theft, and address limitations on healthcare insurance coverage.
Is the protected from fraud and theft part somehow incorrect?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Insurance_Portability_a...
"...objectives of the Act were to combat waste, fraud and abuse in health insurance..."
For example, I’ve met several founders who wanted to enable tele-medicine years ago but decided against it because “the lawyers cost more than the engineers”, and walking-on-eggshells destroys morale & iteration speed.
I’m not arguing to de-regulate heath data — my point is that we should selectively apply regulation.
It’s likely a great thing to regulate self-driving cars. But please keep the lawyers away from my niche online forums, 3rd-party clients for social apps, blogs, video games, calculators etc...
It doesn't take a suite of lawyers to enforce that, either. Health care is gigantic mess of bullshit in the US especially, because of the multiple different 'stakeholders' - customers, insurance companies, brokers, "networks", hospitals, doctors, etc., and every mistake is a gigantic lawsuit waiting to happen. It's a disaster however you cut it.
As for personal data for some arbitrary startup, any argument that "innovation" depends on being able to be careless or cavalier with that data is just ridiculous. Be careful with it. Store it properly. Only collect what you need, and delete the rest. Expunge data you no longer need. Never send it to any third party without asking the user, and provide clear information about where and with whom the data is processed and stored at rest.
There, now you're being careful with user data and you can still "innovate" decent products, as long as your business model isn't user-hostile from the start.
The problem they point out is that well intentioned businesspeople who want to provide you a useful service and store your data correctly are priced out.
If you want to deal with medical data of any kind, you need a lawyer. Full stop. It doesn't matter how good your intentions are, or how many "best practice" blog posts you follow. You need to hire a lawyer, and lawyers are incredibly expensive.
> Be careful with it. Store it properly. Only collect what you need, and delete the rest.
This is great advice, but that's not how laws work. Congress won't pass a law that says "store it properly". They are going to pass a law that describes how you can and cannot store data in 600+ pages of legalese. And no matter how properly you think you're doing things, you have to have a lawyer to know you're actually doing it properly.
Said another way: regulation always adds cost and barriers to entry. These affect the "good" business just as much as the "bad" business.
Nobody talks about regulated industries with duopoly or monopolies that everyone has to deal with. Tech industry is exotic ain't?
Big companies will still find a way to track you. That won't change. You can pull up a list of all the privacy focused laws released recently and you can still see Facebook and all their products working fine but you never hear about someone who wanted to bootstrap an idea and couldn't invest much upfront to deal with slow expensive law system.
We don't need more regulations. We need more selective punishments proportional to the damage and presence. Not a lame fine that is not proportional to what companies are profiting from . And if you know anything, Facebook is the one lobbying for privacy these days. They are pushing for some of the requirements they are already compliant with to be put into law .
One is not entitled to do whatever one wants to generate a profit, at the detriment to uneducated or unsophisticated citizens, or society as a whole.
Well, that's what they're doing by not wanting it.
My parent was not doing that, and instead flippantly remarked that you should just store data correctly and everything is fine.
My point is that it is important to consider the implications of government action, because they are always numerous.
Wrong. HIPAA applies to any business that transmits and/or has access to PHI. You don't need to be storing data on your own hard drives to be subject to these laws.
This is exactly my point. You are thinking like an engineer, and Congress is not. You cannot assume anything. You need to hire a lawyer, or you are opening yourself up to serious liability.
Put all of that on the client, do your best to protect it but ultimately make it the clients responsibility.
I still haven't seen any lawsuits or regulation targeting software in that sense, apart from DRM.
This is again the difference between engineer vs policymaker.
As far as I understand it, Microsoft has no responsibility for PIIs e-mails going through the Outlook e-mail client. Maybe the US is different, but at least in Europe, the GDPR is clear that software vendors have no responsibility in data being processed locally when it's deployed and run by others.
Oracle has no liability for the data stored in their database.
If you have no way of touching the data, your servers (self-managed or otherwise) aren't touching data in any form, you have no legal liabilities wrt data (apart from agreements of course).
Or am I missing something?
Then the way to do this is to simplify laws and their understanding. A company shouldn't need a large legal team just to figure out if they are doing something legal or not. It kinda sounds ridiculous when you think about it. That you have to hire a bunch of lawyers to figure out if you are a criminal or not. That clearly means things are too complex. I get that there are places this should apply to, but not small businesses and startups.
You can have regulation that is both easy to understand and effective. There is also letter and spirit of the law. We should never let the letter hinder the spirit.
However, us wanting things to be a certain way doesn't change how things are. If Congress passed a "Data Protection Act" it would be indecipherable, full of technical illiteracy, and heavily influenced by the richest lobbyists (Facebook and Amazon, anyone?).
This is my objection. I would love for a real data protection act to be legislated. But Congress has its own agenda and ineptitudes. Do you really trust the people who wrote the Patriot act to protect your sensitive information?
Hell the whole infosec policy framework used everywhere is built off of NIST 800-53.
HHS uses NIST stuff to guide HIPPA. IRS is more prescriptive, but everything in IRS 1075 is still based on NIST stuff.
You have to separate the political puffery from reality. The Federal government is very good at establishing effective regulatory frameworks. They fall down with the long-term maintenance of regulations, as it's often difficult to keep the legal mandate up to date.
I think pricing out the odd well-intentioned business person is a good tradeoff for avoiding the "move-fast and break things" snake-oil salesmen.
>Said another way: regulation always adds cost and barriers to entry.
And saves money and harm when things go bad.
That said, regulations might make it difficult for companies, but they're there because companies have abused data in the past at the expense of customers. So, I guess, it's too bad - regulations benefit me, they don't strangle businesses, they impede it - and it's an impediment that can be overcome if the business is useful enough to people.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...
Thankfully so - I wouldn't want my telemedicine to rely on eg. some random unsecured Mongodb instance.
Better implementations of that is exactly the kind of innovation we need now.
If the only way your business can survive is carte-blanche regulations around privacy and security, and you fall over the instant that's threatened, one: maybe your business doesn't deserve to survive, and two: maybe you didn't build a very good business.
Niche online forums and all the examples you list there survived (and indeed thrived) in the days before rampant data collection, I have no doubt they'd evolve and survive once again.
The ethical way to preserve privacy is to change minds in a way that changes actions. Law is the threat of violent force, and should be wielded only with deep forethought about the underlying moral and practical realities.
I'm seeing prominent VCs espousing this all over social media the past few weeks. Apparently there are even some advising Jared Kushner.
Don't let a good crisis go to waste.