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Reading further in, it was a screw-up on the paper envelope that had too big of a window and referred to HIV treatment connected to the person's name. This is r

Reading further in, it was a screw-up on the paper envelope that had too big of a window and referred to HIV treatment connected to the person's name. This is really bad, but it was 12k localized instances of crummy physical mailing. Its pretty bad, but it's not like this was "300k people leaked by hackers for ransom".

yebyen 9y ago
It's pretty bad. HIV clinics have "no-contact" lists and if you hypothetically worked for a survey company that made a phone call to one of those numbers, and said you were calling from "XYZ clinic for PQR person who isn't here right now", and the person who takes your call connects the dots, and realizes XYZ clinic is an HIV clinic... you could make two people very upset, and one person homeless. Hypothetically speaking... it could be real bad news. Let's just say after that, we asked every medical office we ever worked with from then on, if they had any "no-contact" lists to please ensure they remove those people from the contact list before we started making calls. We had a mail/phone operation and I'm just imagining our production manager not looking closely enough at even one of 12,000 pieces of mail in windowed envelopes that says "HIV medication" in plain view, before loading them into his car and mailing them at the post office. He'd be canned instantly. Someone definitely got fired over this.
emodendroket 9y ago
Phew, they only needlessly and carelessly divulged 12,000 people's HIV status.
- occultist_throw 9y ago
  I never said it was a good thing. Even though the badness of the situation, I'm saying it would have been terribly worse with mass leaks of the DB this came from. It's not like we in the tech community have seen leaks like that... Regardless, I see this as a bad screw-up with with no ill intent behind it. It was literally a "too large window" on an envelope...
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Yes, but it's almost surreal how negligent this was.
  - nkrisc 9y ago
    Everything can pretty much always be worse, so just saying so isn't really insightful.
Broken_Hippo 9y ago
This could have been prevented, though, and now folks could have to deal with a lot of harassment. There are still folks out there that think AIDS is a punishment from god for a sinful lifestyle or will assume you are gay (with all the discrimination that comes with it). Yet other folks finding out will simply stop using normal gestures with you and stand further back, simply because they are afraid they'll magically catch aids. Sure, it wasn't 300k people leaked by hackers for ransom. It was giving folks reason to discriminate against 12k people. Does it matter if it was localized?
- yebyen 9y ago
  There are two sides to the story though (I'm not defending Aetna, I'm saying this is not only a problem for people who live around bigots.) Some non-zero percent of those 12k people live with a partner who doesn't know their HIV status. It is (edit: could be, if untreated) totally unethical for those people to fail to disclose their status to their partners, but arguably it's much worse for those people to be outed by their health insurance company, who should really be the (#@[expletive](/#@ experts in privacy here. I'm really not sure it's OK that this letter went out at all, even if they had used the right privacy envelopes!
  - chimeracoder 9y ago
    I fully expect to get downvoted for this, but it's an important point that I have to address. > Some non-zero percent of those 12k people live with a partner who doesn't know their HIV status. It is totally unethical for those people to fail to disclose their status to their partners This is itself based in old misinformation about HIV that serves to perpetuate harmful stigmas around HIV. HIV is treatable, and when properly treated, cannot be transmitted[0]. That's not even taking into account other forms of HIV prevention that are practiced to reduce the risk of HIV transmission. While it's advisable for an HIV- to ask their partner's HIV status (and HCV, and other STD statues), a person with HIV under proper treatment should not be expected to proactively disclose that to every partner or potential partner, and it's not "totally unethical" for them to make the decision not to volunteer that information unasked. [0] Decades of misinformation have drilled the false belief that HIV is always infectious into people's minds, to the point where public health groups are literally launching massive campaigns to correct this belief.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
If I were HIV positive, I would much rather my neighbors know my social security number than my HIV status.

yebyen 9y ago

It's pretty bad. HIV clinics have "no-contact" lists and if you hypothetically worked for a survey company that made a phone call to one of those numbers, and said you were calling from "XYZ clinic for PQR person who isn't here right now", and the person who takes your call connects the dots, and realizes XYZ clinic is an HIV clinic... you could make two people very upset, and one person homeless. Hypothetically speaking... it could be real bad news. Let's just say after that, we asked every medical office we ever worked with from then on, if they had any "no-contact" lists to please ensure they remove those people from the contact list before we started making calls. We had a mail/phone operation and I'm just imagining our production manager not looking closely enough at even one of 12,000 pieces of mail in windowed envelopes that says "HIV medication" in plain view, before loading them into his car and mailing them at the post office. He'd be canned instantly. Someone definitely got fired over this.

emodendroket 9y ago

Phew, they only needlessly and carelessly divulged 12,000 people's HIV status.

occultist_throw 9y ago
I never said it was a good thing. Even though the badness of the situation, I'm saying it would have been terribly worse with mass leaks of the DB this came from. It's not like we in the tech community have seen leaks like that... Regardless, I see this as a bad screw-up with with no ill intent behind it. It was literally a "too large window" on an envelope...
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Yes, but it's almost surreal how negligent this was.
- nkrisc 9y ago
  Everything can pretty much always be worse, so just saying so isn't really insightful.

Broken_Hippo 9y ago

This could have been prevented, though, and now folks could have to deal with a lot of harassment. There are still folks out there that think AIDS is a punishment from god for a sinful lifestyle or will assume you are gay (with all the discrimination that comes with it). Yet other folks finding out will simply stop using normal gestures with you and stand further back, simply because they are afraid they'll magically catch aids. Sure, it wasn't 300k people leaked by hackers for ransom. It was giving folks reason to discriminate against 12k people. Does it matter if it was localized?

yebyen 9y ago
There are two sides to the story though (I'm not defending Aetna, I'm saying this is not only a problem for people who live around bigots.) Some non-zero percent of those 12k people live with a partner who doesn't know their HIV status. It is (edit: could be, if untreated) totally unethical for those people to fail to disclose their status to their partners, but arguably it's much worse for those people to be outed by their health insurance company, who should really be the (#@[expletive](/#@ experts in privacy here. I'm really not sure it's OK that this letter went out at all, even if they had used the right privacy envelopes!
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  I fully expect to get downvoted for this, but it's an important point that I have to address. > Some non-zero percent of those 12k people live with a partner who doesn't know their HIV status. It is totally unethical for those people to fail to disclose their status to their partners This is itself based in old misinformation about HIV that serves to perpetuate harmful stigmas around HIV. HIV is treatable, and when properly treated, cannot be transmitted[0]. That's not even taking into account other forms of HIV prevention that are practiced to reduce the risk of HIV transmission. While it's advisable for an HIV- to ask their partner's HIV status (and HCV, and other STD statues), a person with HIV under proper treatment should not be expected to proactively disclose that to every partner or potential partner, and it's not "totally unethical" for them to make the decision not to volunteer that information unasked. [0] Decades of misinformation have drilled the false belief that HIV is always infectious into people's minds, to the point where public health groups are literally launching massive campaigns to correct this belief.

pavel_lishin 9y ago

If I were HIV positive, I would much rather my neighbors know my social security number than my HIV status.