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.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released a new report providing multiple options for how the world can survive and adapt to climate change.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom over the weekend announced that the state has secured a contract with CIVCA to make $30 insulin available to all who need it. He also announced that the state will start manufacturing Naloxone, an emergency medication used to rapidly reverse the effects of an opioid overdose.
The global bottled water industry is booming, and it's coming at a steep environmental cost, according to the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health.
A new gel that helps stop bleeding for both emergency care and surgical procedures in animal medicine is being sought for FDA approval for a human version.
In this photo provided by Henry Danner, Omari Maynard sits with his children, Khari, left, and, Anari, holding a photo of their late mother, Shamony Gibson, at home in the Brooklyn borough of New York on April 9, 2022. Gibson passed away in 2019, two weeks after giving birth to Khari due to a pulmonary embolism. “She wasn’t being heard at all,” said Maynard, an artist who now does speaking engagements as a maternal health advocate.
The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a new plan to lower the cap on the amount of harmful "forever chemicals" allowed in drinking water across the country.
