4 ms·
My wife is a doctor and received a few of these kind of images in whatsapp from her patients from time to time. Should she be concerned?
by neurostimulant 4y ago
My wife is a doctor and received a few of these kind of images in whatsapp from her patients from time to time. Should she be concerned?
- tomohawk 4y agoPerhaps switch to signal or telegram? Some service that guarantees confidentiality.
- desindol 4y agoInstead of questioning the use of whatsapp for medical purposes by a medical professional you tell them to use signal or telegram?
- tomohawk 4y agoWhat would you recomend, then? At least the two I recommend won't destroy your whole digital life if they don't like you.
- hedora 4y agoI think the issue is that you're trying to optimize for patient privacy, quality of health care service, and doctor productivity. The other commenter is trying to optimize for "doctor does not go to jail". The two goals are mutually exclusive in this case.
- tomohawk 4y agoGo to jail? Signal, for example, provides end to end encryption for all uses. Whatsapp does not appear to do that: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/whatsapp-end-to-end-encrypted-messages-arent-that-private-after-all/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/whatsapp-end-to-end-... It would seem like there would be HIPAA concerns with using a channel that does not guarantee privacy, and allows Big Corp to snoop on the content.
- hedora 4y agoYou seem to be forgetting who writes the regulations that regulate this stuff. Less cynically: I think signal is likely a superior choice from a privacy and usability perspective. However, I imagine the hospital probably wants the chat logs to be an immutable part of my medical record. That's probably helpful in the case of bogus malpractice suits, for example. In fairness, state-of-the-art practices store all this data in an enterprise storage array at the hospital (with a remote backup in a colo or something), not on hardware owned by Big Corp.
- Aeolun 4y agoI think one person is trying to optimize for patient convenience. I strongly feel that this is one of those cases where patients do not think about their privacy for once second. It’d be more interesting to meet the patients where they are and find some way to securely get those images into a medical file.
- Thorrez 4y agoWhatsapp and Signal are e2e encrypted. Telegram isn't.
- dvngnt_ 4y agotelegram is just not by default
- Thorrez 4y agoAFAIK Telegram only has e2e for secret chats, which has to be enabled on a per-chat basis, doesn't support group chats, and can only be used from a single device (unlike Whatsapp which I can use on both my phone and desktop browser at the same time).
- doliveira 4y agoWhatsApp images are supposed to be E2E-encrypted, aren't they? Not sure about the whole Google Drive backup, though.
- perryizgr8 4y agoGoogle photos has a mode that will auto backup all received whatsapp images. In that case she could face the same problem.
- rwalle 4y agoAre you located in the US? If so, I would be really concerned, not in this context but about potential violation of HIPPA. All my communication with a doctor's office goes through the "private message" of the office/hospital's website because there are regulations around that. Think about it -- what if she lost her phone and for some reason the phone is unlocked or decrypted by other means? And even if you are not located in the US, I would recommend that your wife looks up local regulation and considers alternative methods to communicate with patients.
- neurostimulant 4y agoNot in the US, but her patients, friends or acquaintances sometimes send stuff like this out of the blue. Can't really be avoided since it's unsolicited.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoI doubt a doctor as the recipient would get in trouble--they have legitimate needs to look at things. And it's not a HIPAA violation if the patient sends it. It's only a HIPAA violation if the doctor sends it insecurely.