The Right Not to Share: Weighing Personal Privacy Threat vs. Promises of Connected Health Devices

Abstract

Connected health devices and applications offer tremendous promises in healthcare management and delivery by shifting medical care outside of the doctor’s office or hospital setting directly into the hands, homes, and everyday lives of patients. While the future (and present) promises a lot of things to a lot of people, there are tradeoffs. In the case of connected health devices, the tradeoffs concern information privacy and data protection. The problem is that there is no comprehensive law regulating the collection and use of personal information in the United States or a single law regulating “health-related data” in the United States. Instead, there is a patchwork system of hundreds of federal and state laws and regulations. This chapter discusses the future (and now) of connected health devices, the promises and personal privacy threats associated with connected health devices, the state of the law as it relates to these devices, and best practices for “bridging the gap” between the personal privacy threats that exist under the current legal regime and promises of connected health devices.