Against Simple Universal Health-Care Identifiers 3 citations ? 0 self

Abstract:  This paper was published as P. Szolovits and I. Kohane. Against Universal Health-care Identifiers. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 1:316--319, 1994. 2 characteristics [4,5]. With this ability, the snoop can not only invade the privacy of someone already targeted, but can in fact develop new lists of interesting targets who meet specific criteria. The techniques are already widely (and legitimately) used by marketing organizations who select prospective catalog recipients by sorting through records of past purchases, but current use tends to be limited to searches over specific, isolated data sets, not over the lifetime accumulation of information about everyone. Yet, under current proposals, we are making it simpler to collate information from very different sources by indexing all transactions pertaining to an individual under his or her SSN. Future snoops may be able to develop lists of people with certain educational and job backgrounds who suffer from specific maladies and like to spend money on certain kinds of entertainment. The opportunities for abuse are enormous. Yet the more and more widespread adoption of a single identifier facilitates and encourages just this situation. The SSN was created in support of the social security program of the Federal Government in the 1930's. Originally limited in use to recording individual contributions to the social security plan, its approved Federal use has been broadened to identifying taxpayers and their tax transactions, civil service employment, Defense Department personnel, recipients of some forms of public assistance, and other functions. In addition, states use the SSN for their own tax-related records, and many also index drivers' licenses, motor vehicle registration, and criminal history ...