ArticleJournal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA
The inadvertent disclosure of personal health information through peer-to-peer file sharing programs.
Article in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Clinicians' Concerns About Mobile Ecological Momentary Assessment Tools Designed for Emerging Psychiatric Problems: Prospective Acceptability Assessment of the MEmind App.Journal of medical Internet research · 2019Article
- Patient Health Record Systems Scope and Functionalities: Literature Review and Future Directions.Journal of medical Internet research · 2017Review
- Recent trends in biomedical informatics: a study based on JAMIA articles.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2013Article
- P2P watch: personal health information detection in peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.Journal of medical Internet research · 2012Article
- Clinical research informatics: a conceptual perspective.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2012Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveThere has been a consistent concern about the inadvertent disclosure of personal information through peer-to-peer file sharing applications, such as Limewire and Morpheus. Examples of personal health and financial information being exposed have been published. We wanted to estimate the extent to which personal health information (PHI) is being disclosed in this way, and compare that to the extent of disclosure of personal financial information (PFI).
designAfter careful review and approval of our protocol by our institutional research ethics board, files were downloaded from peer-to-peer file sharing networks and manually analyzed for the presence of PHI and PFI. The geographic region of the IP addresses was determined, and classified as either USA or Canada. MEASUREMENT: We estimated the proportion of files that contain personal health and financial information for each region. We also estimated the proportion of search terms that return files with personal health and financial information. We ascertained and discuss the ethical issues related to this study.
resultsApproximately 0.4% of Canadian IP addresses had PHI, as did 0.5% of US IP addresses. There was more disclosure of financial information, at 1.7% of Canadian IP addresses and 4.7% of US IP addresses. An analysis of search terms used in these file sharing networks showed that a small percentage of the terms would return PHI and PFI files (ie, there are people successfully searching for PFI and PHI on the peer-to-peer file sharing networks).
conclusionThere is a real risk of inadvertent disclosure of PHI through peer-to-peer file sharing networks, although the risk is not as large as for PFI. Anyone keeping PHI on their computers should avoid installing file sharing applications on their computers, or if they have to use such tools, actively manage the risks of inadvertent disclosure of their, their family's, their clients', or patients' PHI.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.