15
votes
They told their therapists everything. Hackers leaked it all.
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Then a Hacker Began Posting Patients' Deepest Secrets Online
- Authors
- William Ralston
- Word count
- 4390 words
With how pretty much everything in the world is becoming digitized, it's hard to imagine this becoming a one off instance. I find that the levels of trust you need to engage in these systems is ever increasing, especially with the rise in popularity of teletherapy. Fortunately this instance doesn't seem to have as much of an impact as say the Ashley-Madison data breach, but still to be involved in something like this must be terrifying.
With that being said, how is encryption not bog standard for these kinds of databases? I can't imagine the time constraints could really justify a lack of security, so to me it just comes off as negligence.
Ideally, this kind of thing shouldn't be online at all.
At the most, it should be in the therapist's personal cloud service, not on a central server, and ideally encrypted.
The harm in having this kind of data compromised outweighs the benefits of digitalization in my view.
All my therapists took notes on paper.