The European Commission wants the European Health Data Space to make better use of our medical information across the EU. But this shouldn't be at the expense of our privacy. Decisions over our medical records belong to us! We’re calling on MEPs to protect patients' privacy in the #EHDS proposal.
act.wemove.eu
The European Commission is proposing to hand them access to our sensitive, private medical records
As it reads now, the new law would compel healthcare providers to share sensitive medical records with just about anyone who wants them for “research”. This includes Big Pharma, Big Tech and insurance companies. What's worse is that they won’t need our permission to access our data, or to even inform us that they’re using it.
Handing out our most intimate personal information to everyone from researchers to pharmaceutical corporations to Big Tech makes doctors and other medical and healthcare professionals complicit in a massive breach of patients’ trust.
This would make our most personal and sensitive records vulnerable to Big Pharma, Big Tech and insurance companies, ready to mine and exploit it in the pursuit of turning a profit.
We’re calling on lawmakers across the EU to amend the European Health Data Space by:
- Requiring explicit consent from patients before any of their health data is being handed out for secondary use
- Limiting the extensive categories of ‘health data’ to what is absolutely necessary for medical public interest research
- Narrowing the purposes for which this information can be used, and who can access it
edit:
A spreadsheet on ad platform Xandr’s website revealed a massive collection of “audience segments” used to target consumers based on highly specific, sometimes intimate information and inferences
themarkup.org
What words would you use to describe yourself?
You might say you’re a dog owner, a parent, that you like Taylor Swift, or that you’re into knitting.
If you feel like sharing, you might say you have a sunny personality or that you follow a certain religion.
If you spend any time online, you probably have some idea that the digital ad industry is constantly collecting data about you, including a lot of personal information, and sorting you into specialized categories so you’re more likely to buy the things they advertise to you.
But in a rare look at just how deep—and weird—the rabbit hole of targeted advertising gets, The Markup has analyzed a database of 650,000 of these audience segments, newly unearthed on the website of Microsoft’s ad platform Xandr.
The trove of data indicates that advertisers could also target people based on sensitive information like being “heavy purchasers” of pregnancy test kits, having an interest in brain tumors, being prone to depression, visiting places of worship, or feeling “easily deflated” or that they “get a raw deal out of life.”