Privacy laws and enforcement in the U.S. are seemingly growing by the week on both the state and federal levels, with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) serving as one of the players in the federal enforcement game. The FTC has released a statement warning developers of data that are working as model-as-a-service companies to be wary of any illicit uses of data acquired to assist in development of artificial intelligence algorithms, a warning that these developers and their customers would do well to heed.
The European Union and the U.S. have wrapped up a data privacy framework that covers broad swaths of both economies, including the transmission of clinical trial data across the Atlantic Ocean. Drug and device makers that want to make use of this framework and thus jettison the contractual clause to ensure data privacy may find compliance with this new framework much more efficient in the long run, but will have to do a lot of compliance work on the front end to achieve those efficiencies.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been moving aggressively on privacy issues in connection with health data in the past two years, but the agency has issued an advisory of sorts to collectors of these data points. The FTC said July 11 that it intends to crack down on violators in an effort to protect data privacy.
LONDON – The European Commission (EC) has put forward proposals for a Data Act that is intended to both give users greater rights over their own data and allow greater third-party access. The Act sets out who can use and access data generated in the EU across all sectors of the economy. It is pitched by the EC as opening the doors to an under-used resource that will in turn promote research and innovation and create new markets in information services.
Responding to the growing number of state-sponsored cyber threats to health care and other key sectors and to the compromise of the Microsoft Exchange Server, which was disclosed in March, Canada, the EU, U.K., U.S. and other NATO allies issued statements July 19 laying out expectations and markers for how responsible nations behave in cyberspace and specifically calling out China’s “malicious cyber activity.”
Researchers at Yale University have described what they have called a “data sanitization tool,” enabling them to strip personal identifiers out of functional genomics data while preserving their usefulness for research.