HIPAA created standards to protect sensitive health information from being disclosed without patient consent, but there are a lot of misconceptions around what HIPAA actually covers, and what it doesn’t.
Legal battles over abortion have sprung up across the country since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. There’s been confusion among medical providers, patients and law enforcement over what information could be used against someone in court if they try to get an abortion that’s been criminalized.
A lot of Americans might assume any medical decision, procedures or data is completely protected by HIPAA — the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The law created standards to protect sensitive health information from being disclosed without patient consent, but there are a lot of misconceptions around what HIPAA actually covers, and what it doesn’t.
To start, there are 12"national priority purposes" within HIPAA that allow for information to be disclosed without your permission. Law enforcement is only one of them. Information can be disclosed for things like court orders, identifying potential witnesses to a crime or if the entity holding the info believes the medical data is evidence of a crime.
Once law enforcement is alerted and the prosecution is trying to determine if a pregnant person tried to end their pregnancy, that’s where that phone data is going to come into play, and there is a lot of data they can pick through. It’s not just health-related apps that might be incriminating. Any ordinary apps can have location tracking data, and Motherboard also found at least one data broker who has sold location information for users that visited abortion clinics.
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