US government is pushing to gain unprecedented access to your medical records – as data protections are weakening

The U.S. government is maneuvering to access medical records from a vast majority of Americans, according to The Conversation. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy has been working since spring of twenty twenty-five with state health information exchanges—systems that link hospital and clinic records—seeking data potentially covering ninety percent of Americans by twenty twenty-eight. The stated purpose: investigating whether vaccines cause autism, a question the scientific community has definitively answered no. But the broader privacy concern is more alarming. HIPAA, the federal law meant to protect medical privacy, has significant gaps: it doesn't cover health apps, search histories, DNA tests, or wearables, and even HIPAA-covered records can be handed to law enforcement or government without consent. Research published in Nature reveals another critical problem: data stripped of identifiers isn't truly anonymous. Artificial intelligence can re-identify individuals from supposedly scrubbed records, with the highest risk falling on underrepresented and vulnerable groups. Meanwhile, the government's appetite for health data extends internationally. The State Department has conditioned foreign aid to African nations on access to citizens' health records; Uganda and Kenya have already struck multi-year data-sharing agreements.

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