Down the hole. Who needs those records anyway?

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Health and life insurance companies have access to a powerful new tool for evaluating whether to cover individual consumers: a health "credit report" drawn from databases containing prescription drug records on more than 200 million Americans.

It's important to know that these prescription reports and others like it are not regulated at all while credit reporting companies are heavily regulated, and still are a problem sometimes.

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Because of fears of data sharing, data loss, and inappropriate disclosure, people are circumventing their doctors and insurance companies when getting DNA tests. Smart people.

Can and would they use your DNA results against you? Do credit card companies raise your rates according to unrelated things on your credit report? Do insurance companies raise your rates due to traffic tickets that have little to do with telling how good or safe a driver you are?

Like I said, avoiding a record of your DNA is a smart idea.

They dropped their "don't be evil" motto for a reason

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I…. I just don't have the strength to explain why this is a bad idea today. "Do no evil". Yeah… ok. You forgot about, don't do something that will make it easy for evil people to do evil, but I guess that wouldn't look as good as a company motto.

Oh, but don't worry! Your data will be protected by your Google account password! I feel better already…

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Seattle pediatrician Rupin Thakkar's first inkling that the pharmaceutical industry was peering over his shoulder and into his prescription pad came in a letter from a drug representative about the generic drops Thakkar prescribes to treat infectious pinkeye. In the letter, the salesperson wrote that Thakkar was causing his patients to miss more days of school than they would if he put them on Vigamox, a more expensive brand-name medicine made by Alcon Laboratories. "My initial thought was 'How does she know what I'm prescribing?' " Thakkar said. "It feels intrusive. . . . I just feel strongly that medical encounters need to be private."

It appears that several drug marketers have been tracking what physicians have been prescribing in order to custom tailor their marketing pitches.