ObamaCare Placing Americans’ Data in One Basket
The sensitive data of every American who went to the federal healthcare exchange and told the website information is stored in one government data warehouse. The database, named MIDAS, collects Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, employment statuses, address and birthdates and stores them, as the government currently has planned, forever. Furthermore, the government makes this information available to third party sources, but it won’t say who exactly has access. Senior staff attorney with the Electric Frontier Foundation Lee Tien told the Associated Press, “A basic privacy principle is that you don’t retain data any longer than you have to. The more data you keep, the more harm an attacker or unauthorized person can do.” This appears to be the same mistake the Office of Personnel Management made when it stored the data of federal employees past and present. It stored data for too long and then China snapped up the data of up to 14 million Americans who worked for the federal government in a hack. The federal government says MIDAS meets and possibly exceeds the privacy and security standards set by the federal government — but this is why ObamaCare’s database is such a worrying problem.
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- ObamaCare
- cybersecurity