LA Times: Are you tracking your health with a device? Here’s what could happen with the data

Health information provided to hospitals, doctor’s offices and medical insurance companies is protected from disclosure under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA, which established federal standards protecting such information from release without the patient’s consent. But health data collected by many wearable devices and health and wellness apps don’t fall under HIPAA’s umbrella, said Suzanne Bernstein, counsel at Electronic Privacy Information Center. 

“In the U.S. because we don’t have a comprehensive federal privacy law … it falls to the state level,” she said. But not every state has weighed in on the issue. 

… “This information being sold or shared with data brokers and other entities hypercharge the online profiling that we’re so used to at this point, and the more sensitive the data, the more sophisticated the profiling can be,” Bernstein said. “A lot of the sharing or selling with third parties is outside the scope of what a consumer would reasonably expect.”

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