<story><title>Unencrypted patient medical information is being broadcast across Vancouver</title><url>https://openprivacy.ca/blog/2019/09/09/open-privacy-discovers-vancouver-patient-medical-data-breach/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>noodlesUK</author><text>In my part of the US, I can overhear loads of PII by just tuning my VHF transceiver to various public safety frequencies. I hear drivers license numbers, medical info, all sorts. I hesitate to think that there’s a better alternative though. I’m terrified that the UK is moving to LTE rather than the current trunked radio. The amount of damage caused by comms failing in a major emergency (or even just dead zones) massively outweighs the risk of a little data loss at present. If there are more reliable communication methods that preserve privacy, then we should be using them, but I’m not sure they exist at the moment.&lt;p&gt;edit: to be fair, it should be possible to encrypt some of the traffic, but things should fail open, not closed, or people will die.</text></comment>
<story><title>Unencrypted patient medical information is being broadcast across Vancouver</title><url>https://openprivacy.ca/blog/2019/09/09/open-privacy-discovers-vancouver-patient-medical-data-breach/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Herodotus38</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a hospitalist (internal medicine employed by a hospital). I&amp;#x27;m fairly certain that what they are intercepting are pages from the ER to admitting or consulting physicians.&lt;p&gt;In the US, this would be a HIPAA violation but I&amp;#x27;m not sure of the Canadian law. We still use pages at my hospital, but no PHI, only room numbers in the ER for admissions are paged and then you log into the EMR. We use HIPAA compliant texting apps to communicate PHI.</text></comment>