Facebook - A Lesson For Electronic Medical Records Enthusiasts

Who owns your health data? Your doctor, who created the written record from information that you, labs, radiologic services, other physicians, hospitals and other resources supplied, believes that she owns the record. When your doctor reaches retirement, she will "sell" her practice to another physician who will receive and hold those records. If your doctor doesn't have some rights to those medical records, she won't have much to sell and her retirement funding may be scuttled by her inability to sell her practice to a successor.

If medical records become relegated to an electronic database, who owns the records? Is it the patient, insurers, the owner of the network over which the records are transmitted, the owner of the hard drive or server-farm on which the records are stored, the medical practice, some hacker (perhaps in Russia or China), the federal government, Microsoft, or some other entity? Or does this simply remain an issue between you and your doc?

That brings us to Facebook which attempted to impose its own interpretation of ownership of the material within its domain. This is the rule that Facebook unilaterally published, which created a storm among its customers:

"You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof." If you click the title above, you will have a link to the Facebook operation's web page which documents the results of its unpopular attempt to appropriate its customers property, including copyright rights.

Now, any politician who believes that Americans will be happy if their private personal health information is appropriated for the purposes of insurers, the federal government, Microsoft, hackers or a host of others who have financial interests at stake just doesn't get it. Clicking the title (above) will bring you to the Facebook web page which will illuminate everything.

If Obama doesn't pay attention to the Facebook storm, he won't understand the potential for disaster in the appropriation of individuals' private medical histories by the health care government/industrial complex and its financial industry allies.