Data brokers are now selling your mental health status

People are being forced to decide if they should seek out healthcare or support for their conditions and accept that they'll be branded with that for the rest of their lives in countless databases sold to anyone willing to pay or if they should just suffer in silence and avoid the doctors, medications, and online communities that might help them.

Right now, expect that your health conditions are up for sale and being passed around like candy to anyone willing to pay for it. It's bad enough that lists of people who are addicts, prone to impulsive purchases, or easily confused/tricked are extremely valuable to scammers and advertisers, but that same data can cost you a job or housing and open you up to harassment as well.

The same is true for anyone calling a crisis service, such as a suicide hotline or a rape crisis center or those visiting shelters and mental health clinics. People's phone records and GPS logs have been available for sale for a very long time. The last thing someone in crisis should need to worry about are the life long consequences of dialing one of these phone numbers or walking into a clinic.

Industry will not do the right thing, and the market has failed to provide a solution to this problem, so it looks like we need laws with real teeth and sustained oversight to enforce those laws.

The study published by Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy: https://techpolicy.sanford.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites...

HIPAA only applies to covered entities. For example GoodRx isn’t one of those.

I’ve seen recently a lot of advertisements for mental health telehealth providers and I’m wondering if they are selling personal data as well.

If hackers steal a database with healthcare records and publish it online, it's a crime, right? But if data brokers do the same, and even profit off it, the law has no problem with that.

I’ve pretty much given up hope on finding productive treatment for mental health issues. The default provider/patient relationship in the U.S. is parasitic, and the only way to escape it is to settle down in one place and find someone you can stick with for years. Until I do that, it doesn’t seem worth the effort/risk.

Hypothetically, if any and all data harvesting past what is strictly necessary to run services were to be comprehensively made illegal starting tomorrow, would the internet collapse?

Need I ask why the USA hasn't adopted a data protection law to prevent such shenanigans?

The only people objecting to the GDPR are scummy businesses who haven't yet understood that harvesting and/or selling personal data without consent is both not ethical and no longer a legal business model.

The budgets and incentives are all wrong. We have to do something which will make ad and profiling zombies stay in bed every morning and look at the ceiling, instead of leaving the bed and starting their workday.