I'd say I'm still skeptical because they have a history of skirting the law. Fool me once...

idk I feel like the days of Uber fucking up are getting past us with changes in last 6 months. YMMV.

I do fully admit that I haven't been keeping up to date on their latest changes, so that may be true. But IMO, 6 months isn't nearly enough time to forgive the major fuckups that they've been doing

They fired basically every executive and the new CEO has been building the c suite from a fresh start. He’s made a bunch of good moves so far and seems like a mensch.

But the new CEO still failed to disclose an enormous breach for months.

It’s not fixed.

What in the world are you talking about? As soon as he found out about the 2016 breach, he ran an investigation, found that the chief of security was responsible, fired him, and then came forward to the press about it.

IMHO, that couldn't have been handled better.

Really? You’re aware that people have had their information compromised, including driver’s licenses, and you do an “internal investigation” for months before notifying them? No, you patch the hole and let them know, not wait until you have a scapegoat for better PR.

And Aug 30 to Nov 21 is very much “months”.

Aug 30 is more like "job start date", not "you're aware that people had their info compromised".

This convo sounds like when folks were jokingly asking Dara the week after he started the job if he had fixed all the problems in the company, made it profitable and ready for IPO yet.

Considering that the timeframe in question would be probationary period for a normal person in a normal job and that the guy was jumping into what was effectively a burning transcontinental train wreck, I'd say getting an investigation completed and disclosed within a few months of his job start date is actually pretty commendable. By comparison, it took like half a year for people to see anything come out of the Holden report, and timeframes for resolution for some historically big scandals in other companies have taken far longer (e.g. the Equifax one is still making news with bigger and bigger impact estimate corrections).

Also, I find it curious that you think Joe Sullivan was made a scapegoat out of convenience, since there isn't a single news article about him complaining of being fired unjustly. You'd think news orgs would be all over such a story.

The point isn't that he was outed as only a scapegoat. The point is why you'd spend time waiting to see who you should fire before letting your victims know.

> why you'd spend time waiting

It's not like Dara walked into a whiteboard in the CEO office that said "list of 2016 suckers lol" and then sat on it twiddling his thumbs for a month. My understanding of the incident is that it had been covered up by Sullivan and TK. In my mind, an investigation is precisely for figuring out what the hell happened, who was affected and to what extent.

I don't know the specific details of this investigation in particular, but for the Holden one, it involved a lot of one-on-one interviews with various employees to try to reconstruct the stories of each harassment claim so that an appropriate punishment/course of action could be determined for each case. If this investigation was conducted in a similar manner, it wouldn't surprise me that finding out the blame would occur in tandem with discovering the extent of the breach.

new CEO joined Sept 2017, breach was disclosed in Nov 2017

it's more than 1 month, but "months" is a stretch here

Mid-November. Two months is still months, but I can see it leaving an impression of being longer than it was.

I feel like there has been evidence to say that for the past three years, yet they keep screwing up.

Al Capone was convicted on tax crimes, could this be the way to get Uber?

Uber has comparative advantage in making itself a difficult target even when there is a strong legal case that they broke the law.

HIPAA violations would have the federal government on the quick.

It’s not a “delay and get people to show up to town hall” sort of issue.

People always repeat this idea that HIPAA is the most serious of all the serious regulations, that you most definitely do not want to violate.

Yet I’ve never heard of a major company fined or punished for HIPAA violations. Have there been any such notable incidents in the past few years?

There are plenty of incidents every year. Just this year, there were 2 already:

https://compliancy-group.com/hipaa-fines-directory-year/

I bet Uber is quaking at the thought of a $3.5 million fine.

They lose like 1000x that per year.

You probably make over 100k/yr if you're a software dev in some major city, but I'm sure you wouldn't want a $350 traffic ticket, right?

This is a poor comparison and I hope you can understand why. If not let me know and I can clarify.

Sure, it is, insofar as a corporation cannot physically quake in its boots. A fine is designed to discourage an entity from doing bad things. TFA says Uber is working with Clearwater, which indicates to me that the incentive of a potential fine is working as intended.

One can try to argue that uber is lying about its hipaa compliance efforts in order to save the few hundred thousands that they would be paying Clearwater and in dev costs, and one can counter argue that that accusation has no reliable sources to back it up and is fueled by a desire for internet karma points.

HHS prefers not to use civil monetary penalties, but they hit when they do: https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/compliance-enfor...

It's serious. I've worked in biotech and healthcare my entire career. The FDA is also not to be toyed with.

It’s serious stuff. One violation could easily destroy a startup or small-to-mid sizes software company.

But Uber is neither, and has a clear, repeated history of disrespecting any hard or expensive to follow laws.

So if a company stores medical history data it's only required by law to prevent the data from leaking to the public? It's okay if a system administrator employed by the company has read access to people's medical records?

sorry if i was unclear. if a company is storing medical history data that falls under HIPPA which is serious.

If a company just has data about you that is not medical data then there is no legal requirements as to who can have access to it internally. (So Joe's Sprocket's has a list of everyone who has bought sprockets and their phone numbers - anyone in the company could look at that info and there would be no legal implications)

I see. I think I misinterpreted the "0 legal requirements" part of your comment. It gave me the impression employees not involved in the care could access medical data. Thanks for clarifying.

No. Anyone internal to the company viewing medical data without an explicit need is in violation of hipaa.

But I don’t think that’s what the poster was saying.

I see. I don't know the details of HIPAA but that seems reasonable. What kinds of needs justify use of the data?

One example. A friend of mine who works at a hospital told me about a colleague (a nurse) who looked up her own test results since she was anxious and could not wait using her login to the main system (for providers). She got flagged in the system and reprimanded. Every access is logged.

it's worth noting for others that this was almost certainly a hospital policy violation, not a hipaa violation. There's nothing in hipaa that prevents a person from accessing their own record (though I have heard hospital administrators try to claim otherwise).

You need to be part of a patient’s care team, using that data to further their care. Any other access is a violation.

Med students get a little grey area on this because their job is to absorb as much info as possible without necessarily providing care, but even they shouldn’t venture outside the census of their supervising physician.

That's absolutely false. Many other people need to be able to access the data just to keep systems working. I've worked in a HIPAA environment (as well as FDA class 1 / ISO 13485) for nearly 15 years now.

Also, many companies who deal with medical data, but are say startups but not an actual healthcare provider gets audited for compliance - and it is fairly rigorous and so think of it like a SOX audit, but even further. Some companies have dedicated rooms with limited, tracked, badge access to the machines in that area which are the only machines that can access the data.

So if any breach occurs, access can be tracked to individuals.

So programs are allowed access to the data, provided they are audited?

In my country, one programmer who unfortunately lost his newborn daughter to sepsis decided to make a machine learning program to help doctors diagnose the infection early. The software has access to patient data and it recognizes patterns that match the development of sepsis. It decreased the number of severe sepsis cases per month from 1.5 to 0.5 and cut the waiting time before effective treatment was administered by 60%.

People have told me this sort of system would not have been impossible in the USA because of the HIPAA. Is this true?

These types of programs do exist in most insurance companies in the United States. Predictive analytics against claims and clinical data to do early intervention care management is a common thing here.

That said, the company has to make sure that only the people that have a clinical need to access the data have access. So the developers would probably use a de-identified data set to write and test the program. Only the clinicians (care management and disease management nurses) would have access to the identified data so they can contact the patient to offer care.

Yep - de-identified data is the best way to assure compliance when developing/working-on/dealing with large sensitive data-sets.

that said, compliance audits are pretty strict if they are doing it correctly, and not-so-fun. It will be an interesting world when there is a medical-data-firehose pointed at an AI that is looking at all the available med records to do predictive analytics against an entire population....

We are likely a decade from that.

I think there would be significant challenges to do so. I think this is one of the reasons why google's health care initiatives in the US failed so horrifically and one of the reasons why their deepmind NHS initiative is with the NHS and not someone in the US.