Once COVID-19 hit, the demand for mental health services skyrocketed, and with in-person care suspended, many turned to digital services — which led to a disturbing breach of data privacy.
The Duke Sanford School of Public Policy conducted a data brokerage study that found sensitive mental and physical health information was being collected, aggregated, bought, and sold by digital mental health service apps. And those services, in many cases, were not bound by HIPAA regulations.
The list of buyers of the personal health information is vast that includes banks and other financial institutions, US law enforcement agencies, advertising firms, insurance providers — and scammers.
Some digital health service platforms priced the health data of its customers between $200 and $5,000, while others offered subscriptions that doled out information monthly for $75,000 to $100,000.
So what's up for sale? The study found that some services were selling data on anonymous customers, others sold information that included a person's age, sex, race, postal code, and mental health status.
Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission filed an order with the Justice Department against GoodRx, a leader in American healthcare and operator of a telemedicine platform, for illegally sharing user information with advertising behemoths like Facebook and Google. The company has since agreed to pay a $1.5 million fine. If the suit is honored in court, it would ban GoodRx from sharing sensitive personal data with third parties.
A 7.2 magnitude earthquake was reported in Alaska over the weekend, leading to a brief tsunami warning.
Over 11 million Americans are under a heat advisory, with the extreme weather hitting the southern U.S.
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The World Health Organization moved to classify aspartame, the artificial sweetener in diet soda, as a possible carcinogen.
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More than a third of Americans were under extreme heat advisories, watches and warnings Thursday as a blistering heat wave that's been baking the nation spread further into California, forcing residents to seek out air conditioning or find other ways to stay cool in triple-digit temperatures.
Tourists in central Athens huddled under mist machines, and zoo animals in Madrid were fed fruit popsicles and chunks of frozen food, as southern Europeans braced for a heat wave Thursday, with a warning of severe conditions coming from the European Union’s space agency.
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Recently discovered teeth of a two-million-year-old human relative in Africa could give researchers new insight into genetics.
