At The Light Collective a lot of time goes into arguing about trust and representation: who has it, who lost it, who is trying to buy it back with a…
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Protecting your privacy online can feel overwhelming. But we can help.As you browse online for health conditions or advice—looking up symptoms, medications, or clinics—ad trackers can quietly broadcast clues about what you’re reading and where you are billions of times a day across the web. Data brokers turn those clues into “audience lists” of people likely dealing with things like asthma, depression, or diabetes (sometimes even tagging caregivers or people in government/medical roles), even when platforms say they ban this. And once your data is pushed into that system, there’s no practical way to control who sees it, how it’s combined with other data, or who it’s sold to next.
When health systems and policymakers think about designing AI for the clinic—slow, controlled, locked inside compliance and limited scope of a clinical encounter. Technology companies like Meta, Google, and Microsoft, on the other hand, thinks about “users”—scaling fast, collecting data first, and asking forgiveness never. And right in that no-man’s land sit patients, who are using AI every day without rights, safety nets, or protections. They’re treated as neither full citizens of the clinic nor valued customers of tech—just data streams to be mined. That gap is where harm festers, safety issues linger, where trust collapses, and where the most vulnerable are left to carry the risk alone.
A growing number of experts and lawmakers are sounding the alarm on how AI and your personal data are being used by the federal government—with little oversight and massive potential consequences. This post outlines what you can do.
Today is World Patient Safety Day, and The Light Collective is proud to share new community-based participatory research on patient priorities in health technology. Health data regulations today are fraught…
Are you at a hospital that can’t help patients? Here is the short term fix.
This year recognized an unmet need to bring patient community representation to shape the governance of AI Policy, through our diverse and growing coalition of patient advocacy organizations and leaders. To address…
This year’s summit will feature discussions led by healthcare providers, cybersecurity researchers, public health policymakers, representatives of rural healthcare, and more. The event will focus on improving long-term resilience and sustainability of the public health sector, examining effectiveness and efficiency of so-called “best efforts” to date. Using real world examples, we will help to build a better framework for improving healthcare cybersecurity, drawing on public policy, operational experience, and economics.
This year’s summit will feature discussions led by healthcare providers, cybersecurity researchers, public health policymakers, representatives of rural healthcare, and more. The event will focus on improving long-term resilience and sustainability of the public health sector, examining effectiveness and efficiency of so-called “best efforts” to date. Using real world examples, we will help to build a better framework for improving healthcare cybersecurity, drawing on public policy, operational experience, and economics.
On April 26, 2024, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued its finalized changes to the Health Breach Notification Rule. Some may remember the prior history of the FTC failing to provide protections for health groups back in 2019. At the time patients raised an FTC Complaint about the privacy of ‘Closed’ groups, yet the complaint went unheeded. It is a notable to see after five years the tides are turning toward stronger consumer protection and health privacy.