Dark clouds and silver linings: impact of COVID-19 on internet users' privacy.

Objectives: To examine the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on the extent of potential violations of Internet users' privacy.

Materials And Methods: We conducted a longitudinal study of the data sharing practices of the top 1000 websites in the United States between April 9 and August 27, 2020. We fitted a conditional latent growth curve model on the data to examine the longitudinal trajectory of the third-party data sharing over the 21 weeks period of the study and examine how website characteristics affect this trajectory.

(How) did attack advertisements increase Affordable Care Act enrollments?

We examine the effects of exposure to negative information in attack advertisements in the context of Affordable Care Act (ACA) and Common Core (CC) education standards and show that they lead to an increase in the ACA enrollments and support of the CC standards. To explain this effect, we rely on the knowledge-gap theory and show that individuals who were exposed to more attack advertisements were also more likely to independently seek information, become more knowledgeable, and consequently support these subjects. In addition to an observational study, to test our hypotheses on the link between exposure to negative information, curiosity, and shifts in knowledge and support levels, we design and conduct a randomized experiment using a sample of 300 unique individuals.

The Role of HIPAA Omnibus Rules in Reducing the Frequency of Medical Data Breaches: Insights From an Empirical Study.

Unlabelled: Policy Points: Frequent data breaches in the US health care system undermine the privacy of millions of patients every year-a large number of which happen among business associates of the health care providers that continue to gain unprecedented access to patients' data as the US health care system becomes digitally integrated. Implementation of the HIPAA Omnibus Rules in 2013 has led to a significant decrease in the number of privacy breach incidents among business associates.

Context: Frequent data breaches in the US health care system undermine the privacy of millions of patients every year.

Professional and geographical network effects on healthcare information exchange growth: does proximity really matter?

Background And Objective: We postulate that professional proximity due to common patients and geographical proximity among practice locations are significant factors influencing the adoption of health information exchange (HIE) services by healthcare providers. The objective of this study is to investigate the direct and indirect network effects of these drivers on HIE diffusion.

Design: Multi-dimensional scaling and clustering are first used to create different clusters of physicians based on their professional and geographical proximities.