Data Privacy

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/business/01stream.html?ref=technology

The above link is to an article which discusses data privacy.  In particular, data privacy regarding doctor patient relations. There has been controversy regarding whether pharmacies can sell prescription records for marketing purposes. In Vermont, a law was passed which allowed doctors to decide whether or not they wanted pharmacies to sell the information. However, there have been talks of extending the decision to the patients as well. Not everyone is supportive of the more privacy conscious legislation. pharmacueticals argue that since patients records are encrypted before they are sold, they are not able to be linked to the prescriptions that they recieve.
I chose this article because I think that data security and privacy is an increasingly relevent topic. As we share more information via the internet, there will be more opporunities for data to be mined and privacy to potentially be intruded upon. In this particular case, I do believe that the right of whether doctor patient prescription should be sold be extended to the patient as well. In the end, i believe that privacy situations like this are very delicate because threats to privacy via the internet are only going to increase.