Fergie's Tech Blog

Red Tape Chronicles: Outsourcing Your Privacy

Bob Sullivan writes in The Red Tape Chronicles:

Obviously, if it's cheaper to do the work overseas, the information has to go overseas. So it's now standard practice that telephone operators in Ireland or Canada have access to intimidate details about Americans' lives. Ditto for transcribers who type in medical records.

Privacy wonks raise alarm bells about such practices. After all, a company that loses data in India may not be subject to American laws. This raises troubling questions. For example, there are no international data loss disclosure requirements of the sort that exist in California, which forced the revelations that made us all aware of what happened at ChoicePoint Inc. last year.

Nor are the concerns about information outsourcing just theoretical. In one celebrated case, a Pakistani transcriber who felt she hadn't been paid for her work threatened to expose a wide swath of Americans’ medical records unless her company paid up. Such criminal acts couldn't be prosecuted in the U.S., even if U.S. data was involved.

posted by Fergie @ 4/18/2006 08:51:00 AM