Everyone is marketing to try and predict and of course in healthcare this is prevalent too and “why they market their ass off”. Tracking and snooping is part of marketing if you have not figured that out yet today. In the video below even ABC has finally come out to state how insurance tracks you, been going on a long time. Prescription data is bought and sold every day with subsidiaries of companies like United Healthcare. This has gone on for years and you are for sale. Prescription data does not fall under the auspices of HIPAA. “HIPAA does not give the Department of Health and Human Services the ability to directly investigate or hold accountable entities, such as pharmacy benefit managers or companies such as Ingenix and Milliman, who are not covered by HIPAA.” Do you like those bottles that remind you to take your pills, gotcha once more with data to sell so read the disclosures on all of these types of programs and devices. Do you like coupons, then read the link below be all means. Below is an image from the wall Street Journal that shows some of the applications that were exploiting the information in the past. When you get a ton load of queries running with many applications without each entity having their own security strongly in place, this type of stuff appears. We had the story about the website Patients Like Me that was breached too by a user disguised as a forum member. My favorite goes back to all the game players on Facebook back in 2009 where they were suckered into sending funny money which turned into real contributions that went to insurance companies. My thought are though that one could spend at least a few of those minutes on learning instead of wasting your time playing games all the time, try to balance this stuff. If one remains brainless on the internet today, somebody will cash in on you if you are only here for shear entertainment. There’s a program that I use to clean my computer all the time and now it also does “flash cookies”. It is called CCleaner. I like the name and when it first came out years ago it was called “crap cleaner” but they changed the name to sound a little better but it does the job and cleans up the “crap” that is left on your computer to track you. If you use the defaults, you are pretty safe here and it will also clean up your registry. I recommend this program as so do many others. Using the program will give you a head start and I recommend reading the help section to get started as it can even do a system restore for you. It will also make your browser work faster too when cleaning the cache. BD
Internet privacy is the new black (or at least it’s the new green). A recent eye-opening investigative series in the Wall Street Journal exposed the complex web of companies that are “tracking” your every move online, and just how much information about you and your online behavior they’re collecting in the process.