Story Archives of 'Privacy'

Concern about a possible case of identity fraud has uncovered a computer glitch at the Small Business Administration.

A New Hampshire woman learned she was on the hook for over seven thousand dollars on a defaulted loan.

A collection agency demanded the money, because the Micronesian man who had taken out an emergency SBA loan had her social security number.

NHPR’s David Darman has more.

We’ve talked about Google, Microsoft and WebMD services that encourage people to upload, store and manage their medical records online. The upside: you and your doctors can have immediate access to your medical information when you need it. The downside: security. As it turns out, voluntarily uploading our health records may be the least of our worries. Researchers at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business found that plenty of doctors, hospitals and health care organizations are inadvertently leaking our data online for us.

Dr. Eric Johnson is director of the Center for Digital Strategies at Tuck, and he and his team went online and found reams of personal health records in public cyberspace. He joins us to talk about what they found.

Center for Digital Strategies: "Data Hemorrhages in the Health-Care Sector"

Center for Digital Strategies: "Information Leakage in the Extended Enterprise"

Eric Johnson discusses "Inadvertent Disclosures" on YouTube:

Wired Threat Level: "Academic Claims to Find Sensitive Medical Info Exposed on Peer-to-Peer Networks"

(Photo courtesy john-norris via Flickr/Creative Commons)

More and more, we seem to be willing to bare it all on the Internet. More than 120 million Facebook users upload photos and all kinds of personal information about themselves every day.

Whenever we sign up for a new email account or for free access to a Website, we gladly hand over our biographical data without thinking much about it. But on the other hand, we still maintain these expectations of privacy. We don’t like the thought of Internet lurkers spying on us, and we certainly don’t want to find ourselves victims of identity theft.

Journalist Eric Griffith of PC Magazine joins us with some tips on how to keep our data safe in an increasingly public realm. Click here for his article on online privacy.

(Photo by Mikey G Ottawa)

Most of the country employs an electronic prescription registry, where doctors and pharmacists can learn instantly which prescriptions you have, who wrote them, and where and how often they get filled. Many in medicine and law enforcement say these registries significantly reduce prescription drug abuse, but New Hampshire is one of the few states that has resisted, as libertarians and other privacy advocates say government has no business collecting and sharing such deeply personal information. We’ll look at the debate and see if a prescription drug registry could be on its way to New Hampshire.

Guests

• Neal Kurk, Republican state representative from Weare
• Dr. David Strang, emergency room doctor in the Lakes Region

We'll also hear from

• Philip Bradley, Assistant Attorney General
• Rick Newman, lobbyist for the New Hampshire Independent Pharmacy Association

Many Hannafords shoppers got a big shock a few weeks ago when the grocery chain acknowledged that hackers had been stealing customers’ credit card numbers for several months. This isn’t the first such security breach in the state. We’ll break down the complex process that begins each time you swipe that card, find out who’s in charge of making sure your payment goes where they’re supposed to, and look at what the private sector is doing to keep up with hackers.

Guests

• Jerry Little, president of the New Hampshire Bankers Association
• Avi Rubin, professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, founder of the data security company Independent Security Evaluators and author of Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting