You have a problem with your doctor googling you, possibly in order to know and cure you better while thousands of companies are crawling the net and harvesting this information for their profit?

If you leave sensitive personal data on the web, having your doctor finding it should be the last of your worries.

How is that illegal? Whatever is found in Google is public. It's like saying you are pirating books when you read them in library. I am not saying all the data that is indexed in Google is safe to use but that's your problem what you post on social networks and if sites you use have a crappy security/infrastructure.

Patients are, across the board, pretty rubbish at giving histories. They overlook things because they don't think it relevant or don't want to tell their doctors for some reason (even though itis relevant). This is especially true of drug and alcohol abusers.

I'm not sure most of those types of things would show up in a cursory search.

You may be underestimating the stuff people post on facebook these days.

You want to ban Google search?

A doctor should be allowed to go by what you tell them. Full stop. I may not want to tell someone about the fact I eat tons of red meat, for example. I may not want my test results to be shared with the insurance company, who will then charge me more. Too much shared information is dangerous.

A doctor already talks to family members when treating patients. Unless the patient has signed a release, the doctor can't talk back about the patient, their medical status, or history, but the family member is free to tell the doctor anything they want about the patient. This is especially good when the patient is very sick and doesn't know it, ie, mental illness. Or something along the lines of "he gets up every night and eats out of the refrigerator and he doesn't know he does it!" The family member who lives with the patient is sometimes better at observing symptoms that the patient misses. When I had a polysomnography (sleep study) done, there was a questionnaire specifically for the person who I shared a bed with, who observed me sleeping.

The family member might be able to tell the doctor a lot more about the patient then the doctor is able to get out of the patient. This has worked wonders in treating my dad, because he isn't able to really talk about his symptoms for whatever reason, he just can't describe them well, or doesn't think some of them are a problem that others are concerned about. My mom observes them, goes to the doctor with him, and tells the doctor what is going on with him.

>I may not want my test results to be shared with the insurance company, who will then charge me more.

That has nothing to do with this. If you don't want to share test results with insurance, then don't. Don't submit the claim to the insurance company, they don't pay for it, and nobody knows the results except you, the lab, and your doctor. If you want anyone else to know, you sign a release. That's how HIPPA works. This has nothing to do with doctors Googleing you.

> I may not want to tell someone about the fact I eat tons of red meat, for example.

So, you want your doctor to make decisions about your health based on lies and misinformation?

Trusting a doctor with stuff like your health, but not trusting them with information about what you eat, comes from a very obscure reasoning.

So don't put "I eat tons of red meat" on the web under your real name then..? I think you might be needlessly conflating the acts of googling someone's name and conducting a thorough investigation into them. Don't panic! :)

You don't want your doctor to have all the information they need to do their job?

This is a double-edge knife. Could help the doctor treat you better or could turn him against you in the sense that he will not be comfortable treating you anymore.

What is fascinating here is that probably most people have no idea how easily accessible their data is from everyone today.

Making anything widely adopted illegal is not a solution. Educating people to be more careful about what kind of info they share online, eponymously seems like a winner. What people don't seem to get is that the internet stays here for ever, for the good and bad.