Privacy anymore???

[Susan_1a_CC]

The Supreme Court has opened up prescription drug records for data mining companies:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/43509570

Does this bother anyone the way it does me?  Of course, I refuse to even join FB...something about their biometric face recognition program that gets under my skin, no pun intended.

[Susan_1a_CC]

It seems to me to be an application of systems theory that guts the interiority of a person  and that soon the drug manufacturers will have even more influence over what an MD prescribes by this exterior observation of the whole.  Perhaps, I'll be diagnosed before I'm even seen since so many of my neighbors are already taking XYZ then I must need it too.

I'll take heart that corporations though are "persons."

[mikesimon]

I try and fine the bright side as hard as that might be.

"...The case centered on prescription records data collectors buy from pharmacists, then sell to drug manufacturers. The data, collected according to federal rules and regulation, do not include patient names but cover information (such as the physician's name and address and strength of drugs prescribed) to allow pharmaceutical companies to track the illnesses physicians treat and their prescribing patterns...."

{"The capacity of technology to find and publish personal information, including records required by the government, presents serious and unresolved issues with respect to personal privacy," Kennedy wrote. "In considering how to protect those interests, however, the state cannot engage in content-based discrimination to advance its own side of the debate."

Kennedy was joined in Sorrell v. IMS Health by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor.}

{Dissenting Thursday were Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan.

Writing for the trio, Breyer said the majority wrongly subjected the provision to heightened First Amendment protection. He stressed that the information covered by Vermont's statute was commercial in nature and existed only because of government regulation of pharmacy records.

"The speech-related consequences here are indirect, incidental and entirely commercial," Breyer warned, adding that the court may have opened "a Pandora's Box of First Amendment challenges to many ordinary regulatory practices."}



Sonia surprised me but the rest of the Court fell right into place.

Mike