| In general, in the US of A, that consent you sign waives your legislated-to-be-guaranteed HIPAA rights. Specifically, you're typically giving the office's providers and their marketing "affiliates" and your insurance company and its marketing "affiliates" the right to forward around (through any length chains of agreements) your entire medical history associated with enough (research proven as de-anonymizing) details to retarget you personally. And you're typically doing this by accepting a company insurance (in the US) or the provider's reception counter while you're in need of care. This effectively forced consent is arguably illegal, but as far as I know, untested, so it's standard across the medical system and across omnibus insurance (e.g. company-provided healthcare "plan"). Of course, every touch point is another place your personal history will get stolen and rolled into modern digitally scripted exploitation of your identity and or targeted forms of phish-mongering (a term I made up meaning marketing so personalized you believe it's necessary to sign up for and pay for). If you have any relationship with the team at your company that procures employee insurance packages, see if you can persuade them to start with the firm's insurance consultant (high end) or broker (low end) and systematically remove every step in the "we can pass along all your info to our affiliates for our own pinky-swear good reasons like making more money off your private info" chain. In our experience, this added 3+ months to the procurement process as every single provider balked until interacted with by counsel -- and then instantly capitulated. Our goal was always to give our employees a top tier benefits package, and we consider it a top tier hard-to-match employee benefit to not have random firms and government agencies pawing through your doctors notes, prescription histories, lab results, and enough biographical data to fake your digital twin. Sadly, most employees -- though none of them are sheeple -- shrug at that for reasons in this thread: no time to fight such pervasive exploitation, especially when it hits them while needing a service as it hit you, or just plain weary of trying. So much easier, and psychically healthier, to just avoid thinking about it. Everyone is resigned. If a company you consider working for claims "we take your privacy seriously" ask if they got privacy waivers removed on your behalf from all vendor contracts including payroll (does your salary go to 'work number'?) and insurance providers (can your data leave your doctor's EMR?). Odds are, they do not, in fact, take your privacy as seriously as they could. |