Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

Re:Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data by kendallpark on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @04:56AM (#17916225)

> "Anonymized". Just with the data posted above, it seems like it'd be pretty easy to correlate the data to a person. And auto-enrolling everyone who buys a health product is not an excuse to mine all their data.

Hospitals are allowed to anonymize protected health information in their medical records to mine the data (they can distribute it too) without the patient's consent. PHI is way more protected than consumer health information, which is what Fitbit has.

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Re:Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data by swift532 on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @06:02AM (#17916517)

I'm guessing here, but I'd say hospitals have much more stringent laws they have to adhere. I doubt someone is auditing Fitbit. It's like another commenter said here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17915986

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Re:Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data by specialist on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @06:18AM (#17916577)

File under believe but cannot prove:

In the privacy arm's race, deanonymization will always win in the long run.

The best we can do is temporary privacy.

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