BIG BROTHER

Healthcare.gov Keeps Client Data Forever

“Perpetual central repository.”

Data on people who seek insurance coverage through the Healthcare.gov site may be kept indefinitely in a government data warehouse, despite increasingly common breaches. Data kept includes that of people who merely signed up for an account on the site but didn’t finish the enrollment process. Before the launch of the federal exchange site, the Obama administration promised that information collected would be used for eligibility purposes—not as a “perpetual central repository” for information for federal agencies. “A basic privacy principle is that you don’t retain data any longer than you have to,” said a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet privacy group. “The more data you keep, the more harm an attacker or unauthorized person can do.”