Social networks for health care: Addressing regulatory gaps with privacy-by-design

Abstract

Social computing is a relatively new approach to systems design that emphasizes the importance of facilitating collaboration and communication between users. Although social networking is now part of mainstream culture, the use of these applications in the health care space is still in its infancy in Canada. As major vendors are preparing to enter the marketplace, it is important for a wide variety of stakeholders to discern the ramifications of this next wave of technological innovation. This paper discusses social networking applications for health care, and the challenges of dealing with this new type of information management system under current Canadian law. While regulatory authorities have considered the privacy and security implications of social networking in the course of investigating complaints, this paper contains the first explicit analysis of the legal difficulties surrounding the use of social networking for health care applications in Canada. Those risks not covered by the current regulatory framework are assessed from the standpoint of privacy-by-design, as we discuss how software developers can build privacy protection into social networking applications.

A Privacy Preservation Model for Health-Related Social Networking Sites

“…The concern is not just about data mining and marketing that could influence patients to seek drugs they do not need or to spend more money on branded drugs rather than generics. More broadly, employers, health insurers, and/or identity thieves could gain access to users’ profiles, leading to negative consequences, including privacy compromise, social embarrassment, discriminations from employers and insurance companies, identity theft, and so forth [5,20]. Because health-related SNS are not HIPAA-covered entities, these concerns are very real and must be addressed seriously.…”

“…Visibility and transparency has not been a strong point of health-related SNS. Information mash-ups and the combination of apps and multiple different types of SNS [24] create unexpected information flow through “back channels”, impeding users’ ability to get a clear view of the way their data are propagating [5]. Different actors (eg, users and apps), linkages, and roles are having dynamic interactions with each other through different ways across multiple social networks or websites.…”

Privacy architectures in social networks' state-of-the-art survey

“…6 Information can be generalising after a period of time (Williams and Weber-Jahnke, 2010) by automatically generalising the accessible information to an inactive connection (for example, the connection between a user and health care provider can be degraded over many years in a healthcare SN).…”

“…SN service providers should take the necessary steps to decrease the user burden and to respect user privacy (Williams and Weber-Jahnke, 2010). They should provide an interactive user interface for controlling privacy settings; in this way, the user can edit, hide, or delete their personal information.…”

Trust Management of Social Networks in Health Care

“…For example, Facebook allows an individual to decide who can view the information in his or her network, whereas in Twitter the information can be viewed by followers. In work [17], researchers categorize the dissemination approaches into deterministic communication technique, including distribution hierarchies such as in [29], [30], [31] and probabilistic communication techniques, including epidemic based dissemination techniques, such as probabilistic broadcast and flooding [26], [27]. Each technique reflects how information flows from place to place.…”