He noted that making privacy technologies easier to use and widely available would be helpful, as would better legislation to protect privacy rights. Their Data Protection Act of 1998 says that organizations that collect personal data must register with the government. They may not collect, use or disseminate information about an individual without their consent. They must tell the individual the reason for the information collection. Individuals have a right to see the information collected about themselves and to correct mistakes.
Individuals can opt out of information collection.
He has worked on the problems of controlled sharing of health information and privacy and confidentiality in medical record systems. To illustrate, he displayed a slide portraying the wide, intricate world of organizations to which a single patient visit was reported. Some but not all of these organizations were related to health care, he noted. Professor Szolovits proposed a federal privacy ombudsman who would encourage national debate to determine the balance between patient privacy and organizational needs for information. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 2000 is intended to build a set of regulations making it easy to allow the smooth flow of information on behalf of health care operations and prohibit its flow for other purposes, he noted.