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Healthcare and Big Data pp 49–66Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Privacy and Data Phantoms

Abstract

"She sends my body through the fax machine because I contain vital information that might make or break the bureaucrats on the other end, but when I arrive through the wires I am stored in a box and put in a basement and a few months later the basement floods and I am stuck forever amid boxes of flooded data." (2015, p. 69) Daniel Borzutzky describes the dematerialization of embodied data in his poem The Data Harbor. As patients we produce data in excessive amounts, information that is often collected and constructed into data commodities. This chapter explores the process that private health data undergoes to become commodities.

Keywords

  • World Medical Association
  • Privacy Regulation
  • Informational Privacy
  • Hippocratic Oath
  • Supreme Court Case

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Mary F. E. Ebeling

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  1. Mary F. E. Ebeling
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Ebeling, M.F.E. (2016). Privacy and Data Phantoms. In: Healthcare and Big Data. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50221-6_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50221-6_3

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