In 'The HIPAA Myth', we bust the illusion that HIPAA shields your health data, exposing how Treatment, Payment, and Operations (TPO) let pharmacies, data aggregators, and telehealth apps silently sell your prescription details to ad networks. We then arm listeners with low‑tech counter‑measures—cash‑only meds, burner devices, and paper‑only consent—to keep the surveillance state from turning your medical history into a marketable commodity.
Chapters:
- Intro and The HIPAA Lie: Why most folks think HIPAA = “your doctor can’t tell anyone anything,” and why that belief is a comforting myth.
- The Aggregators: How a handful of data‑hungry companies turn anonymous prescription fills into pinpoint‑accurate targeting tools.
- Telehealth and Check-in Trap: From BetterHelp’s FTC showdown to hidden Meta Pixels in therapy apps—why “online care” can feel more like a reality‑TV set.
- The Convergence: How boss‑ware, car‑trackers, discount‑card histories, and medical data fuse into a single risk model that insurers love.
- Legal Landscape: A rapid tour of HIPAA’s U.S. cousins (HITECH, GLBA, FTC Act) and the global heavyweights (GDPR, PIPEDA, APRA, LGPD, etc.).
- The Impractical Patient: Low‑tech, high‑impact tactics: cash‑only prescriptions, burner phones for telehealth, paper‑only consent forms, DIY labs.
- Outro. Your Body, Your Data: A reminder to stay skeptical, use the tools you’ve learned, and keep the conversation alive, because the best defense against this all is knowing how to use the resources available.
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Stay skeptical. Stay safe. Be Impractical.
