In February of 2017, Memorial Healthcare System settled their HIPAA violation fines for $5.5 Million USD. During an investigation, it was discovered that over 100,000 patient records had been impermissibly accessed. Allegedly, an ex-employee retained access to personal identifying information and sold data records to people who filed fraudulent tax returns using the data. Federal criminal charges were filed against the ex-employee.
Data is the currency of today’s digital economy, the oil of the 21st century. Personal data is considered our economical asset generated by our identities and our behavior and we trade it for higher quality services and products. Online platforms act as intermediaries in a two-sided market collecting data from consumers and selling advertising slots to companies. In exchange for our data being collected, we get what appears to be a free service.
The growth and the market capitalization of social platform providers like Facebook and search engines such as Google demonstrate the value of personal data. Personal data also provides new ways to monetize services as news organizations are finding it difficult to charge ‘real’ money for digital news, but leverage our willingness to pay for a selection of ‘free’ news with our personal data. Every 3 out of 4 persons prefer free registration with selective access over a paid registration with full access.
The revised Payment Cards Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) that was released last Thursday did not provide any ground breaking news regarding the requirement for the protection of publicly facing web-applications against vulnerabilities and web-application attacks.
