Modelling privacy harms of compromised personal medical data - beyond data breach

Abstract

What harms and consequences do patients experience after a medical data breach? This article aims at the improvement of privacy impact analysis for data breaches that involve personal medical data. The article has two major findings. First, scientific literature does not mention consequences and harms to the data subjects when discussing data breaches in the healthcare sector. For conceptualizing actual documented harm, we had to search court rulings and popular press articles instead. We present the findings of our search for empirically founded harms in the first part of the article. Second, we present a modified PRIAM assessment method with the goal of better assessment of harms and consequences of such data breaches for the patient/employee data subject in healthcare. We split the risk assessment into parallel categories of assessment rather than calculating a single risk score. In addition, we quantify the original PRIAM categories into a calculus for risk assessment. The article presents our modified PRIAM which is the result of these modifications. Our overall contribution is the collection of actual harms and consequences of e-health data breaches that complement the overly theoretical discussion in publications. With our operationalization of PRIAM and by providing a catalog of real harms examples, we focus privacy impact assessment on actual harms to persons.