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HIV status of over 14,000 people leaked online, Singapore authorities say
- lostmsu 8y agoShould not this be public in the first place?
- plugger 8y agoNo.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoThat all depends on whether you think it's more important to help people who don't have HIV to avoid being infected with it, or to help people who do have HIV to infect other people with it.
- yeahitslikethat 8y agoAccording to the cdc: General criminal statutes, such as reckless endangerment and attempted murder, can be used to criminalize behaviors that can potentially expose another to HIV and or an STD. I know that the cdc is not Singapore but likely the same.
- krageon 8y agoPeople who have HIV have a right to privacy just like every other human being. It is their responsibility to inform their potential partners. If they don't do that, then they should face consequences but let's not for a second imagine that they're all evil faceless goons who go around and using their privacy as "help" to infect other people.
- lostmsu 8y agoYou forget about simple negligence. Are you saying, that no single HIV+ person ever gets drunk at parties with unintended consequences?
- isostatic 8y agoAnd when two drunk people hook up the first thing they do is check a leak of hiv data? Is that after exchanging photo ID?
- lostmsu 8y agoNot if they did not know each other beforehand. But if they did, that is very much possible. I am surprised you asked that question. The answer seems obvious??
- krageon 8y agoI think you're seeing some cultural difference here. That is, assuming this is actually the sort of thing you do in real life.
- lostmsu 8y agoI honestly have no idea what do drunk people do, that leads to random intercourses. It is an "educated guess", that in many if not the most cases the participants know each other. And looking people up on the Internet is a common thing nowadays.
- dictum 8y ago> I honestly have no idea what do drunk people do, that leads to random intercourses. Suggesting public policy that affects a group whose activities and motivations I'm ignorant about is quite the gamble.
- krageon 8y agoMaybe it would be a good idea for you to actually understand the problem domain you're inventing solutions for before you start thinking up far-reaching methods to mitigate a problem using a method that is unlikely to be used the way you intend it to. Especially if said methods have the potential to impact actual people's lives in a very negative way.
- yeahitslikethat 8y agoI initially had the same thought. Really only potential partners need to know, a negligible fraction of the public, who the patient should tell first.
- Fellshard 8y agoHistory doomed to repetition, on this front. It is important to read about what has or hasn't worked, and why.
- barry-cotter 8y agohttps://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/forty-days/ https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/forty-days/ > One of the many interesting aspects of how the US dealt with the AIDS epidemic is what we didn’t do – in particular, quarantine. Probably you need a decent test before quarantine is practical, but we had ELISA by 1985 and a better Western Blot test by 1987. > There was popular support for a quarantine. > But the public health experts generally opined that such a quarantine would not work. > Of course, they were wrong. Cuba instituted a rigorous quarantine. They mandated antiviral treatment for pregnant women and mandated C-sections for those that were HIV-positive. People positive for any venereal disease were tested for HIV as well. HIV-infected people must provide the names of all sexual partners for the past sic months. > Compulsory quarantining was relaxed in 1994, but all those testing positive have to go to a sanatorium for 8 weeks of thorough education on the disease. People who leave after 8 weeks and engage in unsafe sex undergo permanent quarantine. > Cuba did pretty well: the per-capita death toll was 35 times lower than in the US. > Cuba had some advantages: the epidemic hit them at least five years later than it did the US (first observed Cuban case in 1986, first noticed cases in the US in 1981). That meant they were readier when they encountered the virus. You’d think that because of the epidemic’s late start in Cuba, there would have been a shorter interval without the effective protease inhibitors (which arrived in 1995 in the US) – but they don’t seem to have arrived in Cuba until 2001, so the interval was about the same. > If we had adopted the same strategy as Cuba, it would not have been as effective, largely because of that time lag. However, it surely would have prevented at least half of the ~600,000 AIDS deaths in the US. Probably well over half. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/197754 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/197754 > In 1986, 1 year after documenting its first case of AIDS, Cuba instituted the world's only mandatory quarantine policy for people with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. The Cuban Ministry of Health began widespread HIV testing, focused on but not limited to members of groups considered to be at high risk due to their travel or sexual histories. In 1986 alone, the ministry invested $3 million in testing equipment.1 By 1993, 12 million tests had been conducted in a country with 11 million citizens.2 Cubans with HIV infection were confined in newly constructed sanatoriums across the island and were questioned by health workers about past sexual partners for contact tracing and testing. Critics of Cuba's quarantine policy charged that it violated human rights,3 while supporters applauded Cuba's commitment to HIV control.4 In 1994, the quarantine was officially lifted. However, by 2003, half of all HIV-positive Cubans still lived in the sanatoriums.5 > Cuba's early response to HIV was unique in the world, but so were the circumstances of its quarantine. First, as an island and a Communist country, Cuba was geographically, politically, and socially isolated from North American and Western European countries that reported high HIV infection rates. Second, Cuba's Communist political culture did not recognize individual rights as an impediment to its public health measures.6 Third, compared with other resource-poor nations, Cuba had a well-developed health care system that assigned a primary care physician to all citizens and conducted routine surveillance for infectious disease, and in which universal HIV testing and contact tracing was theoretically feasible.5,7 In addition, the Cuban government prioritized HIV care and by the 1990s devoted $15 million to $20 million annually to providing antiretroviral drug therapy, intensive medical care, high-quality food, and housing to quarantined patients.8
- bootloop 8y agoWow. Someone who is HIV positive is not an criminal and todays medication allows you to reduce the risk of transmission to 0%.
- lostmsu 8y agoDid I say HIV+ => criminal? No. Don't make things up. We have public real estate records not because every homeowner is a criminal. But the number of people getting pregnant unexpectedly gives an idea why it might be good to have a public registry, as opposed to hoping, that human factor won't let you down.
- samcday 8y agoShould we brand these people with serial numbers too? Maybe we should also enroll them in a registry and track their movements.
- lostmsu 8y agoThat argument means nothing to a radical anti-privacy person like me (e.g. prohibit any data to be concealed, except the means to authenticate oneself). That particular problem is a great example, where I don't see any harm in revealing that information, as opposed to keeping it secret, which might cause actual harm in conjunction with the human factor.
- dictum 8y ago> That particular problem is a great example, where I don't see any harm in revealing that information Surely you're aware of at least one genocide that was greatly aided by detailed demographic data?
- lostmsu 8y agoThere's no reason to assume, that in the absence of that data there would be no genocide on some other arbitrary basis.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoOut of deference to the Holocaust, the US government doesn't keep demographic information on religion. As you say, the theory goes that a record of who belongs to what religion might be used to commit genocide. But this theory isn't applied to anything else. The same government collects detailed information on everyone's race, despite the fact that race is a much more common target than religion is.
- shawnz 8y agoIgnoring for a second the problems with allowing potential partners to see such data: What about if your employer sees it? Your colleagues? Your friends? Why should any of them have access to that information?
- shaki-dora 8y agoPeople have rights, even when they are sick. There is absolutely no evidence to believe HIV possitive patients go around infecting others intentionally. Transmission happens during latency, when infected people do not yet show symptoms, and do not know they are infected. A person that knows of their infection is just as likely to be a danger as a shopper on their way home with a large new steak knife. To suggest otherwise is just mindless paranoia, with possibly a homophobic twist. It’s the sort of thinking that created this mess in the first place, considering civilized societies don’t even collect such a database of HIV+ citizens.
- ahje 8y ago> It’s the sort of thinking that created this mess in the first place, considering civilized societies don’t even collect such a database of HIV+ citizens. The purpose of the database may very well be to allow the authorities to contact people with HIV when someone creates a new medicine against HIV, and so forth.
- shaki-dora 8y agoThat’s the job of doctors, not “authorities”. Does a Singapore also have databases of all MS patients on file? Or Huntington’s? Because those patients are far more desperate to learn about new treatments than HIV patients, who actually have rather good options today.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoThe purpose of the database is almost certainly to understand, when a new patient presents with HIV, where they got it from. Trying to answer this question is standard in the US as well.
- lostmsu 8y ago> Transmission happens during latency, when infected people do not yet show symptoms, and do not know they are infected. I wonder how these people get infected in the first place.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dang 8y agoYou started this trollish tangent and posted like a dozen comments in it, which is effectively trolling whether you meant to or not. Could you please not do that on HN? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- fwn 8y agoI'm not an expert and I know that a healthcare system requires the handling of personal data. While this data might end up aggregated at some level, I'm not entirely sure that a registry like this is required to exist in the first place. For me it looks far too sensitive to have it as one central database. (... all assuming that it wasn't compiled by those who leaked it.) edit: "sensible" doesn't actually mean what I thought it does. Replaced it with "sensitive".
- est31 8y ago> While this data might end up aggregated at some level, I'm not entirely sure that a registry like this is required to exist in the first place. Yeah, and the crazies in the German government really want to create a centralized digital registry for health data. Cases like this show what a very bad idea this is.
- pthomas551 8y agoKeep in mind that Singapore is a police state where homosexuality is illegal and HIV positive foreigners are subject to immediate deportation.
- potatofarmer45 8y agoIt never ceases to amaze me how the weakness of a secure system is always the people. It's common to see companies invest in "encrypted databases" and "on premises data storage" in the name of security while not spending the time and money to ensure the users can only see the information they need to see. Nobody should ever be able to just download the entire table like that. Typically in this use case, you'd think the system would be set up such that users can only query full individual records if they work on the case itself OR limited (retracted) records for the entire population. That's how we handle our customer database. If you work as a customer service agent, you can pull the entire record of a single customer but not more than 1 at a time and rate limited. For out data analytics team, you have access to all the records without the personal information (users are given a random unique userID. no names, addresses, emails, or phone numbers). The rationale is simple, we don't want anyone to be able to simply download our customer database and spam them. In this case, the consequences are much worse for the people affected.
- est31 8y ago> Nobody should ever be able to just download the entire table like that. Easily said, but even the NSA couldn't protect from an insider obtaining tons of internal documents. Nor could google prevent the theft of LIDAR sensor trade secrets.
- oliwarner 8y agoDidn't not Couldn't. These access issues [commonly] aren't bugs, they're laziness. Shared volumes to speed up collaboration, no granular permissions, or relying on threat of access audit to keep people in line. In most of these networks, mechanisms exist that could have limited access to those that need it. And part of that is the technological culture of how we've been taught to share files. We still commonly rely on third parties to handle big transfers.
- brazzledazzle 8y agoOften it’s a conscious tradeoff between convenience and security. Google can afford the best off the shelf data loss prevention tools as well as the budget to develop their own. The problem with having your code/assets locked up like Fort Knox is that it becomes a nightmare for your employees. Even if you just have passive systems that prompt investigations about questionable usage people tend to bristle at being spied on, particularly if you remind them of that fact.
- martin_a 8y agoAs a German I have to say that registers for people are a great idea! We have had very positive experiences with labeling people. While we had to do this in an analog way the last time, the label itself really helped a lot with "dealing" with people who were a problem. I think if we would make registers like these again, modern technology would really help us to be even more efficient the next time. Don't see what could go wrong, especially when political leaders change etc. /s
- CaptainZapp 8y agoEven though they didn't have modern technology they abolutely did rely on technological help. It was a pretty dark chapter. Not only for Germany and Europe in general, but also for the IBM Corporation[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- laurentlb 8y agoWhenever someone moves to Germany, they have to get registered. One of the question is about the religion (for tax purposes). I'm surprised Germany still uses this kind of registry.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago>>One of the question is about the religion (for tax purposes). I'm surprised Germany still uses this kind of registry. Forward thinking? Never know when they might need a list of people by religion, ethnicity, invalid status. Better to have and not use, than to need and not have it...or something :)
- martin_a 8y agoNah, it's really just about taxes. I think it's 1% of your income or something like that which is collected by the state for the church. (That itself is often discussed in Germany, as state and church should obviously not be mixed...) But you can "leave" the church, it costs something like 40 Euro for the administrative action and that's it. No discussion whatsoever and you can keep your money. :-D
- threatofrain 8y agoIn a Wild Wild West sense, you are ultimately in charge of your data and your outcomes. Because it doesn't matter what kind of laws supposedly constrain your insurance company or your accountancy; nobody can unring a bell, and it's human nature for information to spread.
- austhrow743 8y agoAny Australians who might not have opted out of our government centralised health record system starting up, just a heads up that you've only got three more days to do so.
- taneq 8y agoYep, this is a perfect example of how even if you "trust your government" your private data can still end up splattered all over the web.
- anitil 8y agoEven despite the risk and probably inevitable leaks, I think a system like this is invaluable for epidemiological research. I'm not opting out. (Besides, the Red Cross has leaked a fair portion of my medical information anyway)