Covered California, the state’s health insurance marketplace, leaked deeply sensitive health information and pregnancy status, domestic abuse disclosures, and prescription drug use to LinkedIn via embedded ad trackers.
It’s a pattern we’ve seen across government and private sectors: infrastructure designed for care is being exploited for behavioral targeting through advertising motions. The public doesn’t expect their health decisions to be fed into social ad networks, but the platforms already assume ownership of that data trail.
And of course, it’s all connected. The same companies monetizing behavioral profiling at scale are now running the most powerful generative AI systems. Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn, is also the key infrastructure partner of OpenAI. Meta's ad tools were present on these health sites too. Google’s trackers are everywhere else.
When you strip away the techno-mystique, what’s driving the AI and data arms race isn’t wisdom. It’s ego, power consolidation, and a pathological fear of being second.
And Sam Altman? He’s not stupid. But brilliance without wisdom is just charisma in a predator suit. Why do you think all these services tie directly into AI?
quantified · 7h ago
Would we be surprised to learn of 10x this level of leakage to Facebook? Based on the social tracking I've casually observed via browser tools when signing up to a variety of services, I'd be surprised if it's not. The weird thing here is that it's LinkedIn getting the data, not that it's being sent.
jajko · 8h ago
Sociopaths being sociopaths, there is nothing more to it. One should never assume those who rose to massive power and wealth on their own are anything else but that. There are few exceptions, or rather well-meaning sociopaths, but they are really an exception.
The idea that they only got there by doing a bit of hard honest work is brutally naive. Its a sad fact of life, but fact it is. Looking at world with such optics, there are hardly any surprises (and no its not all doom and gloom, rather just factual reality with very few disappointments down the line).
lo_zamoyski · 4h ago
What we call "power" is not a property of a person, but a function of networks of relationships. A king is only "powerful" insofar as his authority is recognized. The moment his perceived authority is lost, the moment no one or few recognize it, is the moment he no longer has "power".
In other words, it only works if there is enough social support for it. It requires our complicity.
Most people with ASPD (what you call sociopathy) are not able to build these sorts of networks. They're impulsive. They are over-represented among the homeless. They are poor at planning or foreseeing the consequences of their actions. These are not exactly conducive to building these social networks. A sociopath is more the street thug or the gangbanger and less the CEO of a corporation.
FredPret · 7h ago
It's the idea that class warfare will get us anywhere good that's brutally naive at this point.
pseudocomposer · 4h ago
What do you define as “class warfare?” Do you agree that the current status-quo hyper-consolidation of wealth our economy has fostered since act least 1972 is already an ongoing type of class warfare?
And finally, why do you think class warfare can’t get us anywhere?
Loudergood · 6h ago
Class warfare is already happening from the top down.
No comments yet
timewizard · 5h ago
I love it when enforcing laws and fairness is perceived as "class warfare."
yapyap · 7h ago
I think class warfare will get the working class further than whatever is being done at the moment honestly.
FredPret · 7h ago
...why? How?
Have you seen any history at all? This has never worked.
Cohesive, trusting societies get much further than ones that are at war with themselves. Even so, cohesion and trust are nice-to-haves.
Tech progress and GDP growth has meant that the world's poor live better lives, decade after decade, for many centuries now.
apercu · 7h ago
I don’t think he working class started the war so if the working class stops the class war doesn’t end.
FredPret · 6h ago
People advocating for their interests isn't warfare.
I assure you there are virtually no rich people cackling, monocles and cigars in place, over the fate of the poor.
When the working class unionizes or vote for more rights, this isn't warfare - as long as it's fair-minded and pragmatic rather than idealogical. The same goes for the rich.
Regarding people with other backgrounds and interests as evil sociopaths / socialists is where the problem comes in.
test098 · 6h ago
> People advocating for their interests isn't warfare.
When those interests come at the expense/lives of other people, it is [1] [2].
> I assure you there are virtually no rich people cackling, monocles and cigars in place, over the fate of the poor.
Correct, their theatrics are even dumber than that [3].
Musk waving a chainsaw is one out of many hundreds of millions of rich people. And there's reason to believe that he believes he's doing something that's good for society in the long run, even if you disagree with him.
uoaei · 2h ago
It's not often I come across someone who so clearly identifies as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire.
By definition, 1% of the world's population is 80MM people, so your "hundreds of millions" statement bares your ideological slant more than you may realize.
yndoendo · 2h ago
Empathy is intelligence, a void of empathy is lack of intelligence. Empathy is the only means to "put your self in someone else's shoes".
I would also classify narcissism as a void of intelligence, they cannot be honest with others and themselves. They always must be right and know everything when they are wrong and know nothing about the subject.
Lacking empathy and being a narcissist does not benefit society, only one's self interests. That is billionaire, not millionaire, Elon Musk. He is just selling the idea of "doing something good" to improve his self interests.
How many charities does he fund? How much of with wealth goes to studying the eradication of disease like cancer or parkinson's?
But don't worry, his statement from 2014 about full self driving cars are just around the corner and will help humanity reach it's peak. Just like traveling to Mars. /s
His actions actually harm society. Hungry children have reduced mental capabilities to advance in school and their futures. He choose to actively harm future generations and those he doesn't deem worthy.
We have good working conditions mainly because we can now afford them.
Do you think poor people didn't get upset / rebellious in centuries and millennia past?
The difference now is that we have the GDP and tech to support much cushier lives for vast numbers of people.
biophysboy · 2h ago
Technology increases the size of the pie, but it is always possible to make the distribution of slices extremely unequal. More gdp and tech does not guarantee a better quality of life, as many countries today demonstrate.
uoaei · 7h ago
Cohesive trusting societies are borne out of the struggle to dethrone oligarchs and lords.
kjkjadksj · 6h ago
French revolution worked pretty well for the working class
s1artibartfast · 5h ago
I cant tell if that is sarcasm or not. It was characterized by mass dysfunction and devolved into a dictatorship within 5 years, and 10 years of global war as France tried to fund populist mistakes by pillaging foreign countries, a million French deaths, and maybe 4 million foreign deaths, not to mention mass wounded, starvation, and hardship.
piva00 · 6h ago
> Tech progress and GDP growth has meant that the world's poor live better lives, decade after decade, for many centuries now.
Every single time during the leaps of technology that brought tech progress and GDP growth there needed to be some kind of workers' revolt or the threat of it to actualise poors living better lives. Every leap in progress of systemic quality of life for workers came through class war: revolts, general strikes, mass protest, organized labour, etc.
Why do you think now it's different?
FredPret · 6h ago
Unionizing and voting for Saturdays off and the politics of the underdog hardly counts as "warfare".
It's when we regard one another as evil that we start to pursue ideology over pragmatism and end up cutting off our noses to spite our faces.
I object to my original parent comment's characterizing of everyone with any form of wealth and power as being a sociopath. It's not only untrue (which is disqualification enough), but this kind of attitude doesn't serve anyone.
beedeebeedee · 6h ago
> Unionizing and voting for Saturdays off and the politics of the underdog hardly counts as "warfare".
Yes, the workers' demands were reasonable, but they were met with warfare by the upper class who did not want to accept reasonable demands. The most extreme example is the Battle of Blair Mountain, but there are countless records of strike breakers beating and killing workers for striking and unionizing.
WalterBright · 6h ago
There was no workers' revolt in the 19th century US, but the lives of the poor across the board pulled scores of millions in poverty into the middle class and beyond.
The common thread of workers' lives improving is free markets, not revolts.
beedeebeedee · 6h ago
That is not accurate. There were many strikes in the industrial part of the US during the 1800's. That's how working conditions were improved in the mills. The free market would have crushed the working people had they not banded together and revolted to improve safety, reduce working hours, and increase pay.
The rest of the US was primarily agricultural, and did not have major strikes until later, but the improvement in the lives of those people who lived there was not because of free markets. Their lives improved because of the immense natural resources that were literally being given away free to people to cultivate and exploit, after the Native Americans were subjugated and removed.
vharuck · 6h ago
There was the Homestead Strike in 1892, during which 9 people died. The Pinkerton Detective Agency, which "handled" the strike for Carnegie, is notorious for violently busting strikes in the 19th century US.
The class struggle is a perspective. It points to how blind rich people are to social issues, and how blind the poor are to economic issues. These two need the struggle, gently. Without it, there is either bloody revolution or cruel autocracy.
That's as simple as it gets. Many people get it wrong.
apercu · 7h ago
I assure you that poor people are not universally blind to economic issues. lol.
alganet · 6h ago
That's the least important part of my statement.
There is a struggle between those who have power and those who don't. This displacement creates blind spots, and also vantage points.
lawlessone · 6h ago
poor people can't afford to be blind to economic issues. Rich people have more leeway there.
alganet · 5h ago
Do you consider yourself blind to economic issues? Rich or poor? Straight question.
vharuck · 6h ago
When I first read the headline, I thought it was a boneheaded mistake of forgetting to disable tracking on certain web pages. But no:
>The Markup found that Covered California had more than 60 trackers on its site. Out of more than 200 of the government sites, the average number of trackers on the sites was three. Covered California had dozens more than any other website we examined.
Why is Covered California such an outlier? Why do they need 60 trackers? It's an independent agency that only deals in health insurance, so they obviously (and horribly) thought it was a good idea to send data about residents' health insurance to a third party.
autoexec · 4h ago
I'm sure they did it for money. Those trackers weren't put there for nothing. At least government websites funneling citizen's data to Google by using Google Analytics on their sites can argue that they're just selling out taxpayers to get easy site metrics. When you've got 60 trackers on a single page though, somebody is stuffing their pockets with cash in exchange for user data.
threetonesun · 4h ago
I assume some of it was to show targeted ads on social media platforms. I'm sure an internal KPI is new customers, just like any e-commerce site.
neilv · 6h ago
For the last week, LinkedIn kept showing me ads for some specific dental procedure, near the top of my feed.
It's an optional follow-on procedure for the dental surgery procedure I had scheduled for this week.
I'm much more careful than most people about keeping Web search and browsing history private. But there's a chance that last week I browsed some question about the scheduled procedure, from my less-private Web browser, rather than from the Tor Browser that I usually use for anything sensitive that doesn't require identifying myself.
If I didn't make a Web OPSEC oops, it looks like maybe someone effectively gave private medical information to LinkedIn, of all places (an employment-matchmaking service, where employers are supposed to be conscientious of EEOC and similar concerns).
oaththrowaway · 8h ago
Why does a state have ad tracking data? Are they really that hard up for cash that they need to have ad campaigns for people selecting insurance?
timfsu · 8h ago
I understood it to be the reverse - they advertise on LinkedIn, and the trackers determine whether the users convert once they click through. Not great, but at least not as ill intentioned
kva-gad-fly · 5h ago
Not sure I understand this, but "I" (coveredca) pay linkedin to place my ads, for which "I" have to use their libraries? That then scrape "my" clients/customer data to linkedin? for them to make more money selling that data?
Does this also mean that those pious popups about "Do not sell my information" are essentially vacuous?
cryptonector · 1h ago
It could be insiders getting kickbacks.
1024core · 8h ago
How is this not a HIPAA violation??
SapporoChris · 8h ago
While I wish it was a HIPAA violation, I am not sure it qualifies.
"The HIPAA standards apply to covered entities and business associates “where provided” by §160.102. Covered entities are defined as health plans, healthcare clearinghouses, and healthcare providers who electronically transmit PHI in connection with transactions for which HHS has adopted standards"
https://www.hipaajournal.com/what-is-a-hipaa-violation/#what...
Covered California is a health insurance marketplace. It is not an Insurance Carrier or an Insurance Clearing house. Perhaps they're guilty of something else?
Drunk_Engineer · 7h ago
However, it may violate the state's Electronic Communication Privacy Act.
the state will do an investigation on itself and find no wrongdoing
spacemadness · 8h ago
Sounds like HIPAA needs some adjustments made to cover marketplaces.
AStonesThrow · 3h ago
HIPAA is not designed to protect consumer or patient privacy. That is a silly fiction that voters and constituents believe in order to prop up the legislation.
HIPAA is designed to protect the privacy of providers, clinics, hospitals, and insurance carriers. HIPAA is designed to make it maximally difficult to move PHI from one provider to the next. HIPAA is designed to make it maximally difficult for plaintiff attorneys to discover incriminating malpractice evidence when suing those providers. HIPAA is a stepping-stone to single-payer insurance.
HIPAA also makes it maximally difficult to involve other people, providers, and entities in your health care. No entity under HIPAA can legally divulge the slightest tidbit to your brother, your parents, or anyone who contacts them, unless an ROI is on file. Those ROIs are a thing you have to go pursue on your own -- they are never offered or suggested by the provider -- and those ROIs will expire at the drop of a hat -- and you never know if an ROI is valid until it is tested at the point of that entity requesting information.
wrs · 7h ago
Two reasons: The marketplace is not a covered entity (it doesn’t provide healthcare or process transactions), and the information is not a medical record (it’s typed in by the user, not generated by a healthcare provider).
However, California has its own more general privacy law about using medical information for marketing purposes.
kjkjadksj · 6h ago
So if I fill out my medical record form at the doctors office its not a medical record because me the user filled it out before handing it over the front desk?
wrs · 4h ago
Because you filled it out in the context of interacting with a medical provider, then gave it to them for their records, that is a medical record. (Just like a conversation with your doctor about your history would be.)
If you filled out the same form just to keep in your desk drawer for your family’s reference, it would not be. Also, if you ask for a copy of your record, as soon as you take personal possession of it, HIPAA no longer cares about it, because you aren’t a covered entity.
(Source: I founded a startup that spent a lot of money on attorneys to confirm this.)
autoexec · 4h ago
Filling out forms at the doctor's office is one way they trick you into authorizing them to sell your data and no matter how careful you are about it you can still end up having your data sold. https://www.statnews.com/2023/04/07/medical-data-privacy-phr...
runjake · 8h ago
Who says it's not? It looks like a HIPAA violation to me.
blindriver · 7h ago
If you routinely clear your cookies, does that protect you from long term tracking?
wat10000 · 7h ago
Fingerprinting is an active area of research (both attack and defense), so the answer is, maybe, depending on just how unique your setup is. EFF has a nice demo that will try to fingerprint you and tell you how trackable you are based on non-cookie data: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org
Of course, new techniques are invented all the time, so that may not cover everything.
blindriver · 7h ago
Unless they are targeting a specific individual for spying purposes, is there any benefit to doing such deep fingerprinting at the individual level, given that multiple people might use the same computer? It seems like knowing every single thing done at that computer may be too much information that might not have value but having more broad-based tracking patterns would be cheaper and more profitable, no?
wat10000 · 6h ago
Advertisers say that the better they can target advertisements, the more valuable they are. If so, then every bit of fingerprinting helps. Maybe multiple people use a computer which degrades it for those particular people, but then many other computers are used by only one person, so it's helpful in aggregate. I'm skeptical this actually works, given the atrocious quality of ads that I see when they sneak past my ad blocker, but that's what they say.
goldchainposse · 3h ago
People like to say "big tech sells their data." This is actually rare. Almost every other company you deal with willing gives it to big tech, and they just hoard it and run ads with it.
knowitnone · 8h ago
California will investigate and find no wrong. Also, LinkedIn==Microsoft
ty6853 · 8h ago
They published ("leaked" lol no -- it was all available through a polished portal) the name and address of all CCW and DROS registered firearm holders (including judges, DV victims, prosecutors, etc) and nothing happened.
They use your information for political warfare.
treebeard901 · 7h ago
The reality is that anyone in the medical field can put any kind of information in your medical records for any reason. Many motivations exist to compel this kind of behavior. Sometimes this can be in a part of your permanent record that they do not have to provide to you, even if you follow the rules and laws to request the information. Many exceptions exist under the disclosure laws.
Your information then can be freely shared with others but not given to you or give you any way to correct the false information in your record.
For what it's worth, in the United States at least, you have several permanent records that follow you everywhere you go. Your medical records work in a similar way to your former employers. In fact, employer confidentiality to other employers allows them to say almost anything about you and neither has to share it with you and you have no chance to have any kind of fair process to correct it.
Now add all the data brokers and the other bribery kind of situations and the whole system is basically broken and corrupt.
nradov · 6h ago
That is misinformation. HIPAA covered healthcare providers are legally required to give you copies of your health information upon request, and can only charge a nominal fee for this service (in practice it's usually free). Any patient who is blocked from accessing their own medical records should file a formal complaint with HHS; they have fined multiple provider organizations for violations.
My understanding is that people would have to intentionally click on the ad on LI to get access to the cookie that contains the sensitive info from the insurance signup flow (which was triggered by clicking the ad). Is that correct?
dzdt · 7h ago
Amazing to me that an article like this doesn't have a big section discussing how a provider sharing personal health data without permission is blatantly illegal under the HIPAA act. It only mentions as an aside that there are various related lawsuits.
Covered California's privacy policy explicitly says they follow HIPAA and that "Covered California will only share your personal information with government agencies, qualified health plans or contractors which help to fulfill a required Exchange function" and "your personal information is only used by or disclosed to those authorized to receive or view it" and "We will not knowingly disclose your personal information to a third party, except as provided in this Privacy Policy".
Those privacy policy assertions have been in place since at least October 2020, per the Internet Archive wayback machine record. [2]
Companies outright lie in their privacy polices all the time. The legal risk in doing so is basically zero because nobody bothers to sue and it's impossible to show damages.
actionfromafar · 7h ago
That's nothing. The Federal governemnt sent residents' personal health data to xAI.
barbazoo · 7h ago
Source?
No comments yet
rob_c · 3h ago
Bright to you by the state reinventing gdpr for the American audience another 80IQ moment which will be lauded by some as a brave new world...
Get your act together and either resign or stop handling public data let alone the sensitive stuff. I'm serious, draft that letter now.
cm2012 · 5h ago
Even with the absolute incompetence shown in this article (Meta or Google would never make a mistake like this), no one has been actually harmed.
biker142541 · 5h ago
If you have a value sliding scale of "actually harmed", then almost no privacy breach harms anyone, right? Is the threshold for harm actually being scammed, physically hurt, reputation damaged?
Thankfully, those the law is not based on such thresholds.
cm2012 · 5h ago
Relative to the actual harms caused, HN freaks about this kind of stuff too much.
It’s a pattern we’ve seen across government and private sectors: infrastructure designed for care is being exploited for behavioral targeting through advertising motions. The public doesn’t expect their health decisions to be fed into social ad networks, but the platforms already assume ownership of that data trail.
And of course, it’s all connected. The same companies monetizing behavioral profiling at scale are now running the most powerful generative AI systems. Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn, is also the key infrastructure partner of OpenAI. Meta's ad tools were present on these health sites too. Google’s trackers are everywhere else.
When you strip away the techno-mystique, what’s driving the AI and data arms race isn’t wisdom. It’s ego, power consolidation, and a pathological fear of being second.
And Sam Altman? He’s not stupid. But brilliance without wisdom is just charisma in a predator suit. Why do you think all these services tie directly into AI?
The idea that they only got there by doing a bit of hard honest work is brutally naive. Its a sad fact of life, but fact it is. Looking at world with such optics, there are hardly any surprises (and no its not all doom and gloom, rather just factual reality with very few disappointments down the line).
In other words, it only works if there is enough social support for it. It requires our complicity.
Most people with ASPD (what you call sociopathy) are not able to build these sorts of networks. They're impulsive. They are over-represented among the homeless. They are poor at planning or foreseeing the consequences of their actions. These are not exactly conducive to building these social networks. A sociopath is more the street thug or the gangbanger and less the CEO of a corporation.
And finally, why do you think class warfare can’t get us anywhere?
No comments yet
Have you seen any history at all? This has never worked.
Cohesive, trusting societies get much further than ones that are at war with themselves. Even so, cohesion and trust are nice-to-haves.
Tech progress and GDP growth has meant that the world's poor live better lives, decade after decade, for many centuries now.
I assure you there are virtually no rich people cackling, monocles and cigars in place, over the fate of the poor.
When the working class unionizes or vote for more rights, this isn't warfare - as long as it's fair-minded and pragmatic rather than idealogical. The same goes for the rich.
Regarding people with other backgrounds and interests as evil sociopaths / socialists is where the problem comes in.
When those interests come at the expense/lives of other people, it is [1] [2].
> I assure you there are virtually no rich people cackling, monocles and cigars in place, over the fate of the poor.
Correct, their theatrics are even dumber than that [3].
---
[1] "House Republicans Push Forward Plan to Cut Taxes, Medicaid and Food Aid" - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/us/politics/congress-tax-...
[2] "Sanders on GOP Medicaid cuts: ‘Thousands and thousands of low-income and working people will die’" - https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5302085-bernie-sanders-r...
[3] "Musk waves a chainsaw and charms conservatives talking up Trump’s cost-cutting efforts" - https://apnews.com/article/musk-chainsaw-trump-doge-6568e9e0...
By definition, 1% of the world's population is 80MM people, so your "hundreds of millions" statement bares your ideological slant more than you may realize.
I would also classify narcissism as a void of intelligence, they cannot be honest with others and themselves. They always must be right and know everything when they are wrong and know nothing about the subject.
Lacking empathy and being a narcissist does not benefit society, only one's self interests. That is billionaire, not millionaire, Elon Musk. He is just selling the idea of "doing something good" to improve his self interests.
How many charities does he fund? How much of with wealth goes to studying the eradication of disease like cancer or parkinson's?
But don't worry, his statement from 2014 about full self driving cars are just around the corner and will help humanity reach it's peak. Just like traveling to Mars. /s
His actions actually harm society. Hungry children have reduced mental capabilities to advance in school and their futures. He choose to actively harm future generations and those he doesn't deem worthy.
Do you think poor people didn't get upset / rebellious in centuries and millennia past?
The difference now is that we have the GDP and tech to support much cushier lives for vast numbers of people.
Every single time during the leaps of technology that brought tech progress and GDP growth there needed to be some kind of workers' revolt or the threat of it to actualise poors living better lives. Every leap in progress of systemic quality of life for workers came through class war: revolts, general strikes, mass protest, organized labour, etc.
Why do you think now it's different?
It's when we regard one another as evil that we start to pursue ideology over pragmatism and end up cutting off our noses to spite our faces.
I object to my original parent comment's characterizing of everyone with any form of wealth and power as being a sociopath. It's not only untrue (which is disqualification enough), but this kind of attitude doesn't serve anyone.
Yes, the workers' demands were reasonable, but they were met with warfare by the upper class who did not want to accept reasonable demands. The most extreme example is the Battle of Blair Mountain, but there are countless records of strike breakers beating and killing workers for striking and unionizing.
The common thread of workers' lives improving is free markets, not revolts.
Wikipedia has articles on the larger actions like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1835_Philadelphia_general_stri...
The rest of the US was primarily agricultural, and did not have major strikes until later, but the improvement in the lives of those people who lived there was not because of free markets. Their lives improved because of the immense natural resources that were literally being given away free to people to cultivate and exploit, after the Native Americans were subjugated and removed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
The common thread is both, not one or the other.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/themine...
The class struggle is a perspective. It points to how blind rich people are to social issues, and how blind the poor are to economic issues. These two need the struggle, gently. Without it, there is either bloody revolution or cruel autocracy.
That's as simple as it gets. Many people get it wrong.
There is a struggle between those who have power and those who don't. This displacement creates blind spots, and also vantage points.
>The Markup found that Covered California had more than 60 trackers on its site. Out of more than 200 of the government sites, the average number of trackers on the sites was three. Covered California had dozens more than any other website we examined.
Why is Covered California such an outlier? Why do they need 60 trackers? It's an independent agency that only deals in health insurance, so they obviously (and horribly) thought it was a good idea to send data about residents' health insurance to a third party.
It's an optional follow-on procedure for the dental surgery procedure I had scheduled for this week.
I'm much more careful than most people about keeping Web search and browsing history private. But there's a chance that last week I browsed some question about the scheduled procedure, from my less-private Web browser, rather than from the Tor Browser that I usually use for anything sensitive that doesn't require identifying myself.
If I didn't make a Web OPSEC oops, it looks like maybe someone effectively gave private medical information to LinkedIn, of all places (an employment-matchmaking service, where employers are supposed to be conscientious of EEOC and similar concerns).
Does this also mean that those pious popups about "Do not sell my information" are essentially vacuous?
Covered California is a health insurance marketplace. It is not an Insurance Carrier or an Insurance Clearing house. Perhaps they're guilty of something else?
https://calmatters.org/health/2025/05/covered-california-lin...
HIPAA is designed to protect the privacy of providers, clinics, hospitals, and insurance carriers. HIPAA is designed to make it maximally difficult to move PHI from one provider to the next. HIPAA is designed to make it maximally difficult for plaintiff attorneys to discover incriminating malpractice evidence when suing those providers. HIPAA is a stepping-stone to single-payer insurance.
HIPAA also makes it maximally difficult to involve other people, providers, and entities in your health care. No entity under HIPAA can legally divulge the slightest tidbit to your brother, your parents, or anyone who contacts them, unless an ROI is on file. Those ROIs are a thing you have to go pursue on your own -- they are never offered or suggested by the provider -- and those ROIs will expire at the drop of a hat -- and you never know if an ROI is valid until it is tested at the point of that entity requesting information.
However, California has its own more general privacy law about using medical information for marketing purposes.
If you filled out the same form just to keep in your desk drawer for your family’s reference, it would not be. Also, if you ask for a copy of your record, as soon as you take personal possession of it, HIPAA no longer cares about it, because you aren’t a covered entity.
(Source: I founded a startup that spent a lot of money on attorneys to confirm this.)
Of course, new techniques are invented all the time, so that may not cover everything.
They use your information for political warfare.
Your information then can be freely shared with others but not given to you or give you any way to correct the false information in your record.
For what it's worth, in the United States at least, you have several permanent records that follow you everywhere you go. Your medical records work in a similar way to your former employers. In fact, employer confidentiality to other employers allows them to say almost anything about you and neither has to share it with you and you have no chance to have any kind of fair process to correct it.
Now add all the data brokers and the other bribery kind of situations and the whole system is basically broken and corrupt.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-individuals/guidance-materials...
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/compliance-enfor...
Covered California's privacy policy explicitly says they follow HIPAA and that "Covered California will only share your personal information with government agencies, qualified health plans or contractors which help to fulfill a required Exchange function" and "your personal information is only used by or disclosed to those authorized to receive or view it" and "We will not knowingly disclose your personal information to a third party, except as provided in this Privacy Policy".
Those privacy policy assertions have been in place since at least October 2020, per the Internet Archive wayback machine record. [2]
[1] https://www.coveredca.com/pdfs/privacy/CC_Privacy_Policy.pdf
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20201024150356/https://www.cover...
No comments yet
Get your act together and either resign or stop handling public data let alone the sensitive stuff. I'm serious, draft that letter now.
Thankfully, those the law is not based on such thresholds.