https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-reg...
You have to explicitly grant permission for your data to be sold. What's very likely is that either the healthcare provider or insurance company included a request for authorization to sell that data, and the authorization was signed without paying much attention to it.
(I work in healthcare-adjacent and have met with many lawyers and had to explain them all about "HIPAA compliance"; my comment was not made from ignorance, but practical experience based on learning about how the law is used. There is a privacy rule in it, but that was not the real intent of the law. The intent was to make it easy to keep your health care when you moved between jobs.)
I highlighted SirFatty's text, looked up on google and first result show it near verbatim on cdc.gov.
https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/php/resources/health-insurance-port...
To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to improve portability and continuity of health insurance coverage in the group and individual markets, to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in health insurance and health care delivery, to promote the use of medical savings accounts, to improve access to long-term care services and coverage, to simplify the administration of health insurance, and for other purposes.
Honestly, we're better off with it than without it, speaking as someone with exposure to that industry's internals. That act drives a lot of good security practice within the organizations (mostly liability shifting, but still good). Specifically, the fear it instills of ruinous penalties from regulators drives good practice adoption, IME.
Further, multiple crappy patient portals across providers is a crummy experience, but it's an improvement over the world where providers held the data hostage and had zero interest in accommodating your requests for it, or even the idea that you owned it.
update: Yeah, my bad. The point of this comment was to express my increasing cynicism at how we just keep seeing this kind of corporate behavior over and over again and how even when a tiny win is achieved on things like data collection, right to repair, ease for cancelling subscriptions, privacy, and so on and so on, they are so quickly over taken by new tactics or clawbacks/loopholes/non-enforcement of those laws. HN comments was probably the wrong place to vent and its too late to delete it.
We need to overturn CU if we want to be able to go back to a world where government serves people rather than multinational conglomerates.
And also about the targeting of swing districts.
If someone targets black people, you're on that list; if someone targets white people, you're also on that list!
...why?
> State officials say they embed this technology on the exchanges to measure marketing campaigns and to advertise to people who visit their sites
What an absurdist reality we live in
> Tara Lee, a spokesperson for the Washington state exchange, said the tracker on the site was used for advertising campaigns, adding that email, phone and country identifiers were shared with TikTok.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-healthcare-advertisi...
Personally, I feel local government should not be engaging these services in this way. I don't feel that it's a wise use and that our government employees should be more protective of the public who use their services.
I think you mean "manipulating content algorithms to favor their viewpoints and to target individuals for maximum effect."
Okay. That's not much of a signal, is it? This is "metadata" level of detail.
Why those questions, but no Danish vs non Danish, and so on?
That's it, that's the comment.
ZeidJ•2h ago