Key Resource

World Privacy Forum information and materials on medical privacy topics.

Consumers can learn about Medical Identity Theft, what how to avoid it, and what actions to take if you are a victim.

On Feb. 23, 2012, nine signatory organizations published a MultiStakeholder Principles designed to guide the NTIA MultiStakeholder Process, a self-regulatory process to develop voluntary codes of conduct with industry and civil society. The document states: “The US Department of Commerce is proposing a multi-stakeholder process for developing better applications of privacy principles. For the multi-stakeholder process to succeed, it must be representative of all stakeholders and must operate under procedures that are fair, transparent, and credible. We believe the following baseline principles will provide the multi-stakeholder process the legitimacy it needs to succeed.”

01/23/2012 GPS tracking | United States v. Jones — The US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that police must get a warrant before using GPS devices to track criminal suspects. This case was narrow and dealt specifically with a GPS device physically attached to a suspect’s vehicle. The concurring opinion of Justice Sotomayor points out that the subtler issues of digital era tracking were not dealt with in this case, for example, cell phone tracking, web site tracking, etc. She wrote: “More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. E.g., Smith, 442 U. S., at 742; United States v. Miller, 425 U. S. 435, 443 (1976).” She continued: “This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.”

World Privacy Forum information and materials on medical identity theft.