Medical privacy is very BS in India. China knows more about your health than your family.

lockhrt999

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This is a story of someone I'm close to had to go to the doctor for post covid treatment. The issue wasn't life threatening or wasn't even very private.
So as usual we had to go through the cycle of doctor > blood tests > prescription > getting meds. Nothing fancy. While going through this cycle

1. Most specialists and hospitals in India use Practo app to handle all the appointments, billing, prescription etc. And it's backed by Tencent

2. Ordered blood tests from thyrocare through 1mg. Thyrocare instead of directly delivering your reports, they send them to 1mg first and 1mg shares them to you via their Whatsapp business app. 1mg is owned by Tata and whatsapp business chat are read by facebook as per new privacy rules.

3. As usual doctor only prescribes you commission wala expensive medication which is only available at medical store next to his clinic. Off course we aren't crazy to buy from such medicals. So I (being the tech savvy) ordered cheaper variants of the meds which are made by better farma companies like Cipla from netmeds.com. Meds are packed and shipped by Reliance Retail which is also the owner of the netmeds.

4. Appointments, invoices, reports etc everything is being communicated through email which in this case is gmail. You searched about specialist on Google maps. You type through Gboard or chrome's enhanced spell check who run whatever you are typing by google's servers. Everything here is owned by Google.

In the end, we share health data with Tencent, Facebook, Tata, Reliance, Google.

Obviously we know China controls Tencent and Google, Facebook expose data to US govt (search Patriot law). Between these two countries, I don't know which is a lesser evil. 7-8 years ago I was pretty relieved when Edward Snowden said the data NSA is gathering is so immense that it's not humanly possible to interpret. Little did I know that today you could easily use a bot to machine learn for interpreting this data from your computer.
 
same applies to the US and the senate hearings bear evidence to the trust factor placed. This is related to the *Wuhan Virus* as well and some discussions on genetic mutations which were synthetically done for gain of function as per experts called in by the senate!
 
I wonder why people curse only China and only rant about data getting in China?
Yes, if you use Chinese phones and use it like noobs then yes your data is already into Chinese territory. For that one needs to disable all in-built Chinese backups apps from oppo/redmi/xiomi etc. By default everything goes there and even to google, so simultaneously you are storing your data to US as well as China servers

There are many affiliate for all these brands so you never know your data getting in brazil, korea, russia or any other nation. Its a cloud eod so your data can be anywhere, it can be auto routed rerouted etc.

Lastly, why worry now? The day you singed into an android phone or started using fb/google or plainly the day you started using internet on pc/phones or any device was the day you yourselves were sold out to google/fb/and many such providers.
Nothing can be done about china. A lot of countries are on its payroll (I call it modern colonization). They are beating US to its own game.
BTW forget US, no nation can beat China at least in next few decades. All foundries, cheap labor etc. is where they win. US may be super power of the west but in the est China is the power and even US cant deny it.
Again, not to mention that the payment gateways you are using are free from these stuff hence often one hears news about credit card etc. payment details getting leaked online from popular brands. Think!
The gateways can or might be linked to chinese host or anywhere outside India and who the F is going to verify it? RBI? Its all the same circle.
 
There are many affiliate for all these brands so you never know your data getting in brazil, korea, russia or any other nation. Its a cloud eod so your data can be anywhere, it can be auto routed rerouted etc.
Yes. These days many companies save their data into amazon, microsoft or google cloud services. These databases are not encrypted.

Lastly, why worry now?
I always knew my data going to US and China and it didn't worry me personally even a bit. So what changed?

I wasn't expecting medical industry to get on board. If you didn't know, no one dodge tax like doctors, these guys are pro. I never expected this profession to go digital. That's what changed. And now suddenly when they had to go digital they chose to put all the eggs in a basket controlled by a potential enemy country.

More than a decade ago I was a contractor for a defence organisation. I worked with them, lived with them. They used to have these chinese press locks to secure their offices. Pretty convenient and still safe but surely it was oxymoronic.

I'm finding same contradiction today with health industry.

When they took a stance against India, we deleted a few apps. And if in case we have to take the party to them, they have the keys to delete our health. We handed those keys ourselves, didn't we?

So you see,
I'm not cursing China for being China.
I'm not cursing tiger for killing the goat.
I'm not cursing oil for being slippery.

It's us. Govt doesn't mind chinese investors in critical sectors. And we ourselves don't mind profiteering today even if it means risking the future.
 
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This is where timely intervention through GDPR at a very stage could have somewhat helped. But given how hypocritical our govt is, (ban tiktok, but oppo, Dream 11 were still our sponsors for IPL )shows how deep favouritism is.
 
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