The inadvertent disclosure of personal health information through peer-to-peer file sharing programs

Objective There 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). Design After 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 finan...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: JAMIA
• Authors: Khaled El Emam, Emilio Neri, Elizabeth Jonker, Marina Sokolova, Liam Peyton, Angelica Neisa, Teresa Scassa
• Keywords: Financial Information, JAMIA 2010, Peer-to-peer File, Personal Health