Data Privacy in Healthcare and Social Media

Recently inundated with data privacy concerns, news and even a law passing on data privacy and protection about businesses protecting regarding customer’s information.

Following the Cambridge Analytica controversy, a lot of social media platforms have started to scramble their privacy policy—after all data privacy is crucial point of concern.

The rapidly increasing assimilating exceedingly diverse aided data generating technology in medical, healthcare and biomedical fields and the ever-growing data availability at central locations used in an urgent need of any organization from pharmaceutical manufacturers to health insurance companies to hospitals have primarily made healthcare organizations and its sub-sectors face a flood of big data experienced as never before. While data is being addressed as a crucial component of improving health outcomes, gaining valuable insights and lowered costs, the data privacy and security issues are quite overwhelming that the healthcare industry is not able to take complete advantage of it with the current owning resources. Managing and binding the critical power of data, however, is important for the success of any healthcare organization. It is this context that this article targets to present the data security and privacy issues as applied to healthcare industry while discussing some accessing strategies and mechanisms available for data security and privacy of users.

Hacking has turned out to be the leading cause of attacks on data privacy and breaches. Motivation for such attacks range from any intent of committing fraud, profiting from a selling packaged identity, an unauthorized hospital insider viewing the health records of any movie star; for a financial gain or just to challenge the security system. Data privacy Risks branch from numerous sources: increased motivation, opportunity, or lack of understanding in this health care community in the name of technology.

The cyber security unrestricted community feels it to be too easy to attack any IP address on internet as research has brought light to the proliferation of data attacks happening to a rout-able IP address.

There are high chances that you have probably used Social Media service and found that your personal data has already been leaked, as we live in a technology dominating world, where services offered by companies are based on the web, dominated by every time new methods to attack our personal data.

Before exploring about Facebook’s Terms, Conditions and privacy policy, let’s first talk about the data breaches including attacking the private data of 50 million users.

You see, For Facebook and other social media networks users are just opportunities filled with rewarding data to raise the current profit margin. But with basic ethics, this practice is highly unlikable.

Today’s dynamically-changing technology-use of mobile devices, social media, IoT (the Internet of Things), and cloud storage-put forward a rapidly growing number of access points. Security strength may vary widely. Available data resources about a user can easily be used to exploit items of high value like any medical identity and financial assets. Technology gets even more complex with the attacks emerging from simple viruses, to complicated malwares exposing systems, applications, and networks on various levels of information. Though, a lot of attacks still use simple methods like default passwords for getting access to data with a malicious intent.

Many healthcare and legacy research organizations still haven’t fully adapted to the highly accelerated data privacy risks associating with healthcare industry, whereas a number of cutting-edge organizations have already started to embrace using secure configurable systems that has displaced the IT data attacks. Adoption of any digital technology may outpace the enactment of apt safeguards for security and privacy, in addition to the ability of anticipating and responding to potential threats. The volatile growth of digitally connected devices containing medical information and related data integration into the back-end systems which also contains critical data which may even enable the access to new compromises. Not surprisingly, health care industry have had the largest increase in the count of potential data attacks surfacing any industry.

A lot of social networks owns poor quality security measures that are not able to secure their user’s communications.  And these threats can’t even be recognized before it is too late, giving rise to various network vulnerabilities happening all across the world.

And then comes the issue of globalization. A lot of social networking sites operate on a global level even if we live in different countries, where every single one having its own set of laws. But a lot of them never had laws for data privacy and internet breaches, which has now become a necessity.

Any company planning on doing business with the EU member countries are first required to notify the authorities about the data breach within a time period of 72 hours when discovering the event.

The EU and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is a move in right direction concerning data privacy.

The development of any privacy risk assessment strategy help educate users about risks and benefits of data privacy, with healthcare industry mapping it, describing the actions need to be taken for protecting the collected data, and what a user should expect relating to the possible exposure, while providing the basic guidance of assessing a risk.

So, when it is about data privacy and security of personal data, it is our responsibility to not let social network have access to everything about our life. If you don’t want your private data to get intruded, work for it now! Yes! Everything is in our own Hands. Next, choose a secured and encrypted option, especially that doesn’t store any personal information.  Talking of data privacy, Two-step verification plays an important role in keeping the private data safe.

It’s high time that we realize that our online data is extremely crucial, just like our passport, ID card, or any medical record. Understand, not to serve our privacy on a plate to the social networks, as billions of people have already done. Just don’t be one of them.

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