Linked – A researcher tried to buy mental health data. It was surprisingly easy.
This isn’t very comforting.
“Some of the brokers were particularly cavalier with sensitive data. One made no demands on how information it sold was used and advertised that it could offer names and addresses of people with “depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety issues, panic disorder, cancer, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and personality disorder, as well as individuals who have had strokes and data on theirs races and ethnicities,” the report found.”
The US government spends a lot of time telling people to fear what Chinese companies could do with the data they get from our phones when we use something like TikTok, but they do nothing about things like this.
That has to change. It should not be this easy to buy the information that discloses personally identifiable mental health data. That would be a direct violation of the law if your doctor did it. It should likewise be illegal to gather it from other sources and sell it on the open market.
Updated to add this link – Because The U.S. Is Too Corrupt To Pass Privacy Legislation, Data Brokers Increasingly Traffic In Sensitive Mental Health Data
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