Not much background, but another reminder to
control vendors.
Justin Shafer pointed me to a case where the
government, investigating a healthcare provider, served SaaS MicroMD
with a federal search warrant for some patients’ data.
You can read Justin’s
write-up on his blog, but the case reminds us that patient data
can be disclosed to law enforcement without patients’ awareness or
consent, and that unencrypted patient data – or data that are
encrypted but where the vendor has the encryption key – gives the
covered entity less control over the data. Justin writes:
Better IT security might have prevented the DEA from getting the patient data (disk encryption and setting a backend database password for starters), but when that data is NOT in YOUR control, then you are not going to have that much POWER.
Of course, the government could seek a court order
for decrypted data or any encryption key, and they’d likely get it,
but Justin’s point is worth thinking about in terms of defense
against those not in law enforcement who may also be trying to obtain
your patient data.
Perspective. Could any rational manager believe
in another outcome?
34 Lawsuits
Have Been Filed Against Volkswagen
I’ve been working with NPR to discuss a number
of the week. This time it’s 34 — that’s the number of
federal lawsuits filed against Volkswagen as of Friday stemming from
the German carmaker’s admission that it had designed cars to cheat
pollution tests given by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Since 500,000 cars have
been recalled in the U.S. as a result, the attorneys
filing those 34 cases hope they will result in a class-action
lawsuit.
For my IT Governance students. Your “policy”
is not just what you wrote down. (Implications for Hillary?)
Here’s another good reason (as if we needed
more!) as to why firms should not retain and store data past its
usefulness. Hunton & Williams explains:
Companies should remember that their information governance practices may have significant financial repercussions if they become involved in litigation. One court in the District of Nevada recently took a novel approach to analyzing the accessibility of emails stored on backup tape. In United States ex rel Guardiola v. Renown Health, i the United States District Court for the District of Nevada opined that Renown’s business practice of retaining email older than six months on backup tape foreclosed it from successfully arguing that the emails were shielded from discovery as not reasonably accessible because of burden or cost. The court also refused to shift to the requesting party the cost of restoration and review of the email at issue. A key element to this decision was the court’s perception that Renown’s email archival practices were out-of-date, and it also considered the use of backup tapes for recordkeeping without consideration to “the risk of litigation and corresponding discovery obligations” a nonsensible choice. What is unique about this decision is that the court focused on Renown’s business decisions on how to manage its information in the absence of pending discovery, and determined those pre-litigation business decisions were the critical factor to prevent the company from avoiding discoverability of documents archived per those decisions.
Read more on Lexology.
Perspective. “If you are not connected, we
can't push ads to you.” And apparently it is cheaper to connect
all of India than the rest of the US.
Google to
set up Wi-Fi in 400 Indian railway stations
… The Internet giant is working with the
Indian Railways and RailTel, a government-owned provider of
telecommunications infrastructure to the railways, to initially cover
100 of the busiest stations in India before the end of 2016. The
first stations are expected to come online in the coming months.
"Even with just the first 100 stations
online, this project will make Wi-Fi available for the more than 10
million people who pass through every day," wrote Google CEO
Sundar Pichai in
a blog post. The service will be offered free initially, but the
aim is to make the project eventually self-sustainable, so as to
provide Wi-Fi to more stations and other places, he added.
… India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited
Google's headquarters on Sunday as part of his effort to drum up
support from Silicon Valley companies for his Digital India project,
which aims to connect more Indians through the Internet.
"We
want our 1.25 billion citizens to be digitally connected.
We already have broadband usage across India go up by 63 percent last
year. We need to accelerate this further," Modi told Silicon
Valley executives at a dinner in San Jose on Saturday.
The country has launched an aggressive expansion
of the national optical fibre network that
will take broadband to 600,000 villages, he told the executives,
according to India's Press Information Bureau.
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Students can also collaborate on a single timeline together with a
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I need to remind my students that Google has not
been around forever.
When is
Google's birthday? 17th anniversary doodle recalls 'humble
beginnings'
… The 17th
anniversary Doodle – which appeared in almost every country in
the world excluding the US – features a chunky plastic PC, lava
lamp and the 1998 “Google!” logo, encouraging users to wish the
company many happy returns on the day.
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