I have enjoyed participating in the National Dialogue about Health IT. One of the challenges put forward to my suggestion that decision makers should insist on FOSS in Health IT, was the following comment:

in terms of privacy, there’s nothing inherent in FOSS that makes it superior to all proprietary products.

I have discussed this issue before, mostly when discussing HealthVault, but my comments have been spread out over several articles.

There is an inherent benefit to privacy, confidentiality and security for FOSS health IT systems.

There is another idea on the National Dialogue site that I thought was useful. It separates the concepts of privacy and confidentiality. Most people blur the concepts of privacy, security and confidentiality and talk about them in the same mouthful. For now I will consider that "privacy" is the ability to control who gets to see your data. Although my points apply to confidentiality and security as well.

FOSS Health IT are inherently better ways to respect privacy because they support "trust-but-verify", while proprietary systems just support trust.

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