Lifestyle Corner

While American adults flock to the Internet for health information, they appear to be doing so with a certain amount of trepidation.

One survey found that 75 percent of Internet users are concerned about health Websites sharing information without their permission. Until stronger eprivacy laws are in place, many of these fears are justified, according to Janiori Goldman and Zoe Hudson of the Health Privacy Project at Georgetown University.

The problem, Ms. Goldman and Ms. Hudson write in the November-December 2000 issue of Health Affairs, is that "ehealth occupies a space in and between the two worlds of the Internet and health care, neither of which operates under clear privacy rules. While there are efforts to establish such rules, many ehealth companies appear likely to continue to elude federal and state regulations in the near future."

According to a recent article in the New York Times, the Federal Trade Commission will abandon efforts to get new laws to enhance online consumer privacy and will concentrate instead on enforcing existing laws, such as cracking down on the practice of gathering private information under false pretenses. FTC officials also reportedly want to build on earlier initiatives to educate consumers on ways to safeguard their privacy, the article says.

Mary Jo Deering, PhD, who helped create the healthfinderr Website for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, says there will never be a "100 percent foolproof safeguard" when it comes to eprivacy. "People have to learn and think about online privacy and carefully consider what information to give to a site, why and when," she says.

For example, if you disclose that you are a Hispanic diabetic living in a rural county, or that you are a 60-year-old woman with a family history of heart disease, a health Website could potentially deliver health tips and checkup reminders that are relevant to your particular circumstances. And you needn't disclose your name or address to reap these benefits. "So there are many positive reasons to allow the sharing of information, as long as it's done appropriately and anonymously," Dr. Deering says. "The privacy inherent in the doctor-patient relationship is a good model."

Online Privacy Tips

The American Psychological Association offers these tips to protect your online privacy when using the health Internet:

• Before submitting any personal information to a Website, be sure it has a privacy policy and take time to read it. Be cautious with sites that request personal data and do not post privacy policies.
• The privacy policy should tell you if information obtained on the site is traded or sold to other sites or organizations, or if it will be used to contact you in the future. If so, find out how you can opt out of any information exchange, sale, regular emailings or subscriptions offered on the site.
• When using bulletin boards or chat rooms, consider using a pseudonym, providing only trusted individuals with your real name and email address.
• Websites - health or otherwise - communicate with you and your computer by placing a small data file, or "cookie," on your computer's hard drive. Cookies allow a Website to record things like keywords you used to search, Web pages you browsed and minutes you spent reading each page. Some organizations share or sell cookie data. You can instruct your browser (i.e., Internet Explorer, Netscape) not to use cookies or to prompt you each time a site wants to use cookies. (Your browser's help menu can show you how.) Or you can use "cookie management software" that will automatically delete cookies or alert you before cookies are placed on your system. To learn more, visit http://www.cookiecentral.com or the Electronic Frontier Foundation Website at http://www.eff.org.
• If you want to help your kids understand how to "safely surf" the Web, try the healthfinderrKIDS site that has privacy tips for kids and their parents.
  
  

Pamela M. Peeke MD, MPH, Pew Foundation Scholar in Nutrition and Metabolism, is Medical Advisor to the NWHRC; she also is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and author of the best selling book Fight Fat After Forty (Viking Press, 2000).

Click here to visit drpeeke.com, Dr. Peeke's web site featuring health and wellness issues for women.