Medical privacy and big data: a further reason in favour of public universal healthcare coverage

This chapter explores the challenge that big data brings to medical privacy. Big data promises to significantly enhance the power of medicine to diagnose, treat, and prevent diseases. With this promise, however, come significant privacy risks to data subjects who could suffer unfair discrimination, exposure, extortion, and limited access to health care. To minimize these risks, inappropriate uses of data should be outlawed, and consent must be sought from data subjects, even if it is a limited form of consent such as tiered consent or consent from a data trust. Bad data practices should be made illegal, corporations managing sensitive data ought to respect fiduciary duties and confidentiality, as well as implement the best possible security protocols, and periodically delete data. Regulation must ensure that private companies do not monopolize medical data. I argue that the most effective way of protecting people from suffering unfair medical consequences is by having a public universal health-care system