The World Privacy Forum filed comments with the Department of Health and Human Services today regarding the HITECH Act guidance that HHS published along with a request for comments. The Forum urged the Department to tighten its proposed guidance, and to add more protections, oversight, and rules for “limited data set” breaches.

This is an annotated timeline documenting the activities of the National Health Information Network. Related documents, when available, are linked. Additional source documents follow the timeline.

Risks to Privacy and Confidentiality from Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has significant implications for the privacy of personal information as well as for the confidentiality of business and governmental information. A principal goal of this analysis is to identify privacy and confidentiality issues that may be of interest or concern to cloud computing participants. While the storage of user data on remote servers is not new, current emphasis on and expansion of cloud computing warrants a more careful look at its actual and potential privacy and confidentiality consequences.

Cloud computing is well underway and appears to be expanding rapidly. There has been a good deal of public discussion of the technical architecture of cloud computing and the business models that could support it. Debate about the legal and policy issues regarding privacy and confidentiality raised by cloud computing has not kept pace. The findings set out at the beginning of this document are a contribution to the debate, as are the following policy observations.