By Cameron Abbott and Jacqueline Patishman
Following a ransomware infection in late April, UnitingCare Queensland has suffered a nearly 2 month long ordeal to regain control of its systems. UnitingCare was a victim of malware called Sodinokibi/REvil which encrypted its files and attempted to delete backups.
Read MoreBy Cameron Abbott, Warwick Andersen, Rob Pulham, Michelle Aggromito and Allison Wallace
A number of legal professionals, with significant experience in the field of privacy law, have signed an open letter to encourage individuals to download the Commonwealth Government’s COVIDSafe App.
Among the privacy lawyers are members of K&L Gates own Australian privacy team (and the authors of this blog post) Cameron Abbott, Rob Pulham, Warwick Andersen, Michelle Aggromito and Allison Wallace.
The open letter is signed by members in their personal capacity, and signals that people who care about privacy a lot can still think that supporting the health and economic objectives of the App is more important at this time.
As at the date of this post, more than 5 million people have downloaded the App, with more needed to reach the Commonwealth Government’s target of 40% of the Australian population.
By Cameron Abbott, Michelle Aggromito and Max Evans
The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has published its guidance framework dealing with medical device cyber security for manufacturers and sponsors of medical devices, as well as for consumers, health professionals and other users. This is driven by a number of challenges that regulators face to protect users against cyber security risks, including the alteration of device function, loss to privacy and the alteration of personal health data.
The crux of the framework is based on the TGA view that knowledge is power, in that patients using connected medical devices should be informed about the potential cyber security risks those devices have, and take proactive measures to protect their devices and networks.
Read MoreBy Cameron Abbott, Keely O’Dowd, Giles Whittaker and Harry Crawford
As promised in a previous blog post, K&L Gates have performed an in-depth analysis of the risks of relying on de-identification of data to protect privacy, in the wake of researchers successfully re-identifying de-identified medical data that was released by the Australian Department of Health in 2016.
Read the article on the K&L Gates HUB here.
By Cameron Abbott, Keely O’Dowd and Giles Whittaker
Earlier this week researchers from the University of Melbourne released a report on the successful re-identification of Australian patient medical data that formed part of a de-identified open dataset.
In September 2016, the researchers were able to re-identify the longitudinal medical billing records of 10% of Australians, which equates to about 2.9 million people. The report outlines the techniques the researches used to re-identify the data and the ease at which this can be done with the right know-how and skill set (ie someone with an undergraduate computing degree could re-identify the data).
At first glance, the report exposes the poor handling of the dataset by the Department of Health. Which brings into focus the need for adequate contractual obligations regarding use and handling of personal information, and the need to ensure adequate liability protections are addressed even where the party’s intentions are for all personal information to be de-identified. The commercial risk with de-identified data has shown to be the equivalent of a dormant volcano.
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