Prescription Drug Monitoring Act clears committee

The Senate Health and Human Services Committee passed a substitute version of SB 418, the Prescription Drug Monitoring Act this morning, setting it up for placement on the calendar for the full Senate to vote on before Crossover Day, March 25th. This legislation will establish a state surveillance system for the monitoring of prescribing and dispensing of certain medications.... This database would bypass Fourth Amendment requirements for a warrant for this information.

http://www.peachpundit.com/2010/03/18/prescription-drug-monitoring-act-clears-committee/ 

Our thoughts: This is a clear invasion of privacy and it gives government powers they do not need. We need to be more and more vigilant, even in our great state of Georgia, to ensure that lines are not crossed couched in the name of "doing good". Call and write to stop SB 418.

Interesting Video on Privacy / Facebook

The above is two years old. Not sure if privacy policies have changed, if this is accurate. Just thought you might be interested in doing some research...

Maybe we should have titled this blog "1984" instead of Privacy Priority...

New Pay Discrimination Bill Would Let Government Collect Payroll Records of Private Companies
(CNSNews.com) – A proposed new law would empower the federal government to collect the payroll information of private companies and analyze it in an effort to prevent gender-based pay discrimination. Known as the Paycheck Fairness Act, the law was passed by the House of Representatives more than one year ago, but it had languished in the Senate until Thursday, when it was taken up in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee.

Why no one cares about privacy anymore

Google co-founder Sergey Brin adores the company's social network called Google Buzz. We know this because an engineer working five feet from Brin used Google Buzz to say so.

"I just finished eating dinner with Sergey and four other Buzz engineers in one of Google's cafes," engineer John Costigan wrote a day after the Twitter-and-Facebook-esque service was announced. "He was particularly impressed with the smooth launch and the great media response it generated."

You might call Brin's enthusiasm premature, especially since privacy criticisms prompted Google to make a series of quick changes a few days later. Activists have asked the Federal Trade Commission to "compel" Google to reprogram Buzz a third time to adhere to the no doubt well-informed specifications of Beltway lawyers. A class action lawsuit filed on behalf of an aggrieved second-year law student is underway.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20000336-38.html 

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CDC uses shopper-card data to trace salmonella

As they scrambled recently to trace the source of a salmonella outbreak that has sickened hundreds around the country, investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention successfully used a new tool for the first time — the shopper cards that millions of Americans swipe every time they buy groceries.

With permission from the patients, investigators followed the trail of grocery purchases to a Rhode Island company that makes salami, then zeroed in on the pepper used to season the meat.

Never before had the CDC successfully mined the mountain of data that supermarket chains compile.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100311/ap_on_sc/us_shopper_card_sleuths 

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