[abraca]

No,your doctor actually is not allowed to upload your contact information as a patient to Facebook. It is against regulations. Patient information is private, including contact information. If he or she has done so it IS nefarious.

[abraca]

Extract from wikipedia about protected health information below: note that names and email addresses are PHI and must be treated with special care....

Under the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), PHI that is linked based on the following list of 18 identifiers must be treated with special care:[1]

Names All geographical identifiers smaller than a state, except for the initial three digits of a zip code if, according to the current publicly available data from the Bureau of the Census: the geographic unit formed by combining all zip codes with the same three initial digits contains more than 20,000 people; and the initial three digits of a zip code for all such geographic units containing 20,000 or fewer people is changed to 000 Dates (other than year) directly related to an individual

Phone numbers

Fax numbers

Email addresses

[compsciphd]

that's actually a reasonable argument but would imply that a doctor cannot use any cloud connected phone (i.e. android or ios). Heck, even using gmail from the web might be a problem.

not a lawyer, so dont know the implications.

[tobylane]

The suggestion is that as you go to your nearest doctor's office (or one of the nearest) you're likely to have social friends in common.