this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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Privacy
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Paywalled, but I'll assume the NHS here is the National Health Service in the UK.
"Just don't get sick bro!"
The prob ofc is, everybody will need healthcare in their life. We are at our most vulnerable when we need it the most.
Here in the US we have had endless breaches of healthcare data. Companies that promise to keep it secure. Ofc they can't. Even the ones who make a good faith effort. They can't either! So we get mass breaches, millions of patients. On a monthly basis. Or even more often. Of intimate data. Medications. Dr notes about the patient. Diseases you have.
In my parents day, health info was a piece of paper in a filing cabinet. Nobody could access it from across the planet! Even the gov could not, unless they sent somebody there with a search warrant. Today? It's open fucking season.
Boils my blood.
I couldn’t even get to the paywall - their cookie consent dialog was halfway off the screen and I couldn’t click “reject”
Protip. 90% of the time if you disable JS completely in your browser, that prevents the cookie dialogs. Sometimes prevents other annoyware too.
My fav are the ones where you can click "Accept all", or "More Options..." and the Options path goes to like 50 pages of confusingly worded separate options that'd take 20 min to figure out them all. Asshole design.
When Obama first started talking about this, I worked in healthcare with extremely sensitive data. I said it was a bad idea then, everyone laughed at me.
People think HIPAA is sancrosanct, but I'm willing to bet hospital IT departments aren't thoroughly vetting their third-party contractors as much as one would hope.
You wouldn't believe things I have seen in various industries that are supposedly "fiercely protected by federal regulation."
https://www.onetimefax.com/blog/how-secure-are-faxes/
As an example, I doubt traditional fax to be secure...at all, and you really wouldn't believe stuff I've seen texted and hot/y/gmailed.
On the contrary, it would take a lot to stretch my credulity with how little people understand security and how much they love convenience.
You're probably right about fax. Telecom infrastructure in the US is notoriously insecure, as demonstrated by Salt Typhoon, and the only reason there has been little regulatory pressure to secure it is that the NSA et al love how easy it is to spy on us.
My b. I've seen a lot and every time I think I've seen it all, I witness new security/federally protected data nightmares.
I almost wonder whether these regulations exist not to protect data, but to lull the public into a sense of complacency. Perhaps that's a tad conspiratorial, but so many laws exist to make legislators look good rather than serve their purported raison d'etre - just look at that OS-based age verification nonsense. At the very least, the national security state has a use for such things, regardless.
Fwiw, I got my first physical tinfoil hat from a friend warning about the debt crisis the USA was creating a year or so before "too big to fail." I got a few e-tinfoil hats in the preceding decades.
Conspiracy hypotheses aren't necessarily bad, although plenty certainly are. It's just another term to silence dissidents.
Oh, for sure, but I do like to qualify my statements when I'm speculating without evidence. It is wild, though, once the you start seeing how much reality doesn't align with the endorsed narrative.
You got that right!