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Comment by lb4r | Hacker News Reader

>How easy will it be for any company like MS to correlate that data with all that other data they extracted without user consent?

Doable to some extent, but would they really learn much that we haven't already told them, given our propensity to Google for symptoms and diseases?

Personally, my worry here, if I had some embarrassing medical history that I wouldn't want people to know about, would be some malicious party gaining access to de-anonymized data and using it to blackmail, or just simply making it public.

Edit: Come to think of it, insurance companies could probably have a field day with a data set like this.

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The civilized world has universal health coverage, so the insurance thing isn’t really a problem except in one particular country. But the malicious release is definitely a problem.

It never is a problem until it is. Insurance companies in Germany are also not benevolent. If there is a case where they do not have to pay they won't. If they can use data to save money they will do it, even if it worsens your conditions.

" Insurance companies in Germany are also not benevolent. " You know, that the leaders of public insuarances are voted by the customers.

One might argue that the free market is consumer-driven voting.

Not all public insurances perform these elections but some, e.g. Barmer GEK, Techniker Krankenkasse, DAK-Gesundheit, Kaufmännische Krankenkasse – KKH, Handelskrankenkasse und BKK RWE and I think also AOK.

It doesn't feel adversarial as a customer. Never did for me, never heard it from others. They aren't even regular companies - they have a special legal status. Private insurance, which is also available, is different.

Blatantly false.

I've been in Europe two decades and aside from health insurance being key to more than a few countries, private health insurance is relatively common in tandem with public health services.

Quite typically there is basic service via a welfare system and additional or premium service with insurances. I pay into the public health system at a rate proportional to my income (which is more than what I would pay if I had a worse-paying job for the same service), and I have an additional dental insurance which insures my teeth.

No, I mean full-blown private health insurance. In France, Belgium and Netherlands it's very common (and I think mandatory in NL).

Outside of those countries, it's still somewhat common to have private health insurance (not just dental), such as Mapfre or Regina Maria. Heck, even in Germany something like 1 out of 10 people have private health insurance (again, not just dental).

The "civilized world" does not, however, have universal life insurance nor disability insurance that would cover the full standard of living. Those are, at least in Germany, privatized, and companies could benefit a lot from having access to some extra data.

I'm not sure that getting caught using such data would be sufficiently bad news to be not worth it.

No, because medial data can also be used for things like life insurance, insurance against loss of earnings caused by sickness, and probably a lot of other things.

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