Let me delicately observe that there is a straightforward reason why one has HIPAA-protected information in one's address book and it implies you make hundreds of HIPAA violations routinely.

I get what you are saying, but I'm not sure I agree.

If I buy a new car and it (by design) has a speedometer that sometimes shows the wrong speed or sometimes makes the lights malfunction and I get traffic tickets, do I have no right to be upset with the car manufacturer simply because I routinely speed and roll stop signs?

Honestly, I think HIPAA may have been a net negative to the medical industry and has probably prevented the basic sharing between medical practices and related services that it was supposed to more readily allow. The lawyers have benefited a lot, and the abstract details insurance companies have gathered, but refuse to disclose based on HIPAA grounds to their own customers about themselves and medical practitioners treating those same people is often ridiculous at best.

HIPAA mandates that the people have access to their own PHI held by covered entities, a mandate which did not exist before HIPAA, so it did the opposite of creating additional barriers to patients getting access to their own data.

Patients are denied access to their own records in the name of HIPAA. During a recent medical crisis this happened to me. No amount of threatening or cajoling would get them to release my images to my designated 2nd opinion.

To put it simply, anyone claiming HIPAA is the reason for that is just lying (since HIPAA has no such requirement) and would invent some other excuse -- or simply refuse without explanation -- without HIPAA. In fact, HIPAA patient access requirement mandates that patients have access to, and a right to receive copies of, their records under most circumstances, and refusal to provide such access is an actionable violation of HIPAA -- without HIPAA, there would be no recourse.

Pre HIPAA I never had a problem obtaining my records. The trouble is less-knowledgeable health gatekeepers are relentlessly indoctrinated into believing that privacy is paramount. A records request that doesn't follow a rigid checklist is defaulted to REJECT. And it is in the name of protecting the patient's privacy.

You'd be surprised how it's worked out in reality though... I'm not against what HIPAA was meant to do. I just with the actual circumstances allowed for the more easy communications system that was hoped for... not filling out 100+ fields across 4-5 pages when seeing a new doctor for the first time.

No, I wouldn't be surprised, having worked in the field for most of the time that HIPAA has been in force, and having had experience with trying to get information released by health entities before HIPAA. While HIPAA's requirements may allow more room for inconvenience than they should, and plenty of covered entities fall short of the requirements, the situation is miles better than it was without HIPAA, where such information was often treated as proprietary, competitive information and there was no general mandate -- and thus no recourse in many cases -- for disclosure to the patient.

And most of the history you fill out when seeing a new doctor has nothing to do with whether or not they can get old records -- they want the same information even if they have the old records.

Those practices use purpose-built software, not Outlook or some other Windows-readable program. Microsoft also offers HIPAA-compliant service agreements for such businesses.

If those offices aren't hiring someone who knows those things, they're probably not HIPAA compliant for many other reasons as well.

Very small offices may not use purpose-built software. My dentist when I was at school was a one-person operation (he's retired now).

Even if they are using purpose built software, by default Cortana watches what you type in everything and sends samples (at least) to Microsoft. You can turn Cortana off, but you can't uninstall it or even stop it from running and you can't be sure that Microsoft won't just turn it back on anyway (unless you are an enterprise customer).

I just don't understand why Microsoft doesn't just allow all of that stuff to be turned off by everybody? I could be pretty happy with Windows 10 if it respected my privacy more.

On all versions of Windows 10 you can disable OneDrive, and thus it will not upload locally stored calendars or address books.

It's actually REALLY HARD to disable OneDrive. I've tried about 3 separate methods and the damn thing keeps re-appearing. From what I read, it looks like Group Policy might work, but I don't have AD in our environment and haven't been able to test it.

You don't need AD to set the local security policy.

Just type "gpedit.msc" into run. Then follow this[0].

[0] https://support.office.com/en-US/article/Turn-off-or-uninsta...

That makes me terribly uncomfortable because Microsoft is likely to just silently turn it back on in the future.

I used Powershell scripts to uninstall a bunch of the bloatware (XBox Music, Money, etc...) and they just come back. It's very frustrating.

Same thing happened to me. Drives me crazy.

Thanks. I guess I'll try once again.