Health privacy and license agreements

From: Matthew Skala <mskala _-at-_ ansuz.sooke.bc.ca>
To: discuss (at) canopener.ca
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 13:06:28 -0500 (EST)

This InfoWorld article from September talks about the problem of Windows
license agreements combined with health privacy rules:

   http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/02/09/16/020916opwinman.xml

In Parliament yesterday, Bill C-311 was introduced to entrench protection
of Canadian health information.  This particular Bill may not have a lot
of weight being a private member's Bill, but it reminded me of the issue.
Items 6.4 and 6.5 on Schedule 1 of the Bill seem especially relevant:

   6.4 A health information custodian shall ensure that only authorized
   persons are able to collect, use, disclose or access health information
   in its control. Persons thus authorized must have a clear
   understanding of the authority, parameters, purposes and
   responsibilities of their access, and of the consequences of failing to
   fulfil their responsibilities.

   6.5 An authorized person's access to health information, including
   persons or groups external to the health information custodian, shall
   be limited to only the information needed for the authorized purpose,
   and be in the least intrusive format.

   [See http://www.parl.gc.ca/37/2/parlbus/chambus/house/bills/private/C-311/C-311_1/372111sE.html]

The issue is, if Microsoft's license agreement for Windows requires that
Microsoft be allowed to gain access to anything on your PC, that means
that you can't use your PC to store people's medical records - because the
privacy rules don't allow you to store them where persons not authorized
to see the records can gain access.

No doubt a lot of agencies would look for loopholes to allow them to use
Windows computers to store confidential medical data; but we shouldn't let
them, because this type of license agreement *is* a serious threat to
patient privacy (do you trust Microsoft to be *able* to maintain privacy,
even if you do trust them to *make a sincere attempt*?) and it's a good
argument in favour of open source.
-- 
Matthew Skala, CS PhD student, University of Waterloo
mskala@math.uwaterloo.ca  <-- school
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca  <-- home
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/   http://www.edifyingfellowship.org/

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