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Last Updated: Sep 15th, 2009 - 14:20:36 |
Sharing Music, Movies, MEDICAL INFO?
A doctor walks into his office and says to a meeting of his patients, I
have some good news and some bad news. "Because my staff uses P2P
networks on their laptops, your medical information, up to and
including private diagnosis, insurance information and social security
numbers, can be accessed on those P2P networks."
A patient raises his hand and says, "Ok Doc, now give us the good news."
The Doctor says "That was it. The bad news is, the government is mandating that everyone have digitized medical records so..."
All
right, maybe it won't be that bad, and certainly eliminating the
countless reams of paper that most doctors offices, hospitals and other
patient care facilities generate is a good thing. IF IT'S DONE RIGHT.
That truly scary thing is that Eric Johnson, A Tuck Business School Professor at Dartmouth and his colleagues set out hoping that this was NOT the case. They wrote some simple software to "follow the trail" of P2P sharing, and see what information could be found. The drawback, as most people with some security sense know, is that to use P2P, you literally "drop your shields" as the USS Enterprise did, and let other users at your files. Even if those files contain confidential information that was never intended for sharing. Johnson and his colleagues presented a fulll report, which is summarized here.
My question of course, is, WHY NOT ENCRYPT FILES THAT CONTAIN PERSONAL INFORMATION? You wouldn't want your information passed around, it's time that everyone handling confidential information treated other people's information with the care that they take with their own...
OK, today's rant over.
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