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Ronfar's avatar

I'd be more inclined to favor something like this under a health care system that didn't require you to hire a lawyer every time you see a doctor.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

My wife and I talked about this for a while, and it made for an interesting discussion. We both assumed that it would be possible for someone to identify people based on medical history if a serious effort was made.

I said that privacy is something to be valued, but does negative utility risk a privacy breach would pose outweigh the positive utility access to this data might represent? That is, I wouldn't want my medical records released to the general public, but could I reasonably object if some minimal privacy-protection measures were in place?

She brought up that people might shy away from needed-but-embarrassing procedures if they thought there was a chance that someone might be able to identify them and publicize the treatment after the fact. This would be especially harmful for people with depression, who have been abused, or, say, need an abortion. This effect, she argued, might persist even if steps were taken to limit access to the data (e.g. only to serious researchers), and even if the data weren't released until long after the fact (e.g. even after the patient's death).

Overall, I was more in favor of letting medical records hang out and my wife was more against it. We were able to agree that we might support an opt-out version of this type of program, if there were some minimal sanitzation of the data (enough to discourage casual snoopers, not enough to seriously skew research opportunities), and especially if there was a significant time delay (e.g. decades) between a medical procedure and its publication.

Great topic! What else do you ask your students, Robin?

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