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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak on the subject of technology. The message on technology is very simple. Technology is moving fast, but somehow Congress does not pass laws that keep up with the technology. I wish to state the proposition that, from the standpoint of the right to privacy, our laws cannot be left behind. Every day, more and more Americans are waking up to what technology can do to improve their lives. Thanks to the hard work of the American people in the technology sector, we live in an amazing time. Congress didn't bring about this revolution, and Congress should not do anything to impede the rapid changes taking place in technology.
However, one of the main threats to the growth of electronic commerce is the risk of a massive erosion of privacy. While the Internet offers tremendous benefits, it also comes with the potential for harm. If we lack confidence that our privacy will be protected online, we won't take full advantage of what the Internet has to offer. The Judiciary Committee is now considering a bill to protect the privacy of Internet users. I want to focus on one particular issue, and that is maintaining privacy of personal health information obtained by web sites.
I happen to believe, as a matter of basic principle, that information about my health is very personal, and nobody else should know that without my permission. So I am pleased to join my colleague from New Jersey, Senator TORRICELLI, in cosponsoring an amendment on this issue before the Judiciary Committee. I think it will be up this week, on Thursday.
The amendment Senator TORRICELLI and I plan to sponsor will give citizens a chance to control any health information that they might provide while surfing the web. None of that will be passed on to others without their explicit permission. Our amendment simply provides that a commercial web site operator must obtain permission from a person before sending health information to another entity. In addition, it would require that individuals be told to whom their medical information will be released if permission is given.
I know to people watching this sounds like a pretty simple, commonsense thing, that there would be no dispute and it ought to be part of the laws of our country under our Constitution that personal information not be sold or used by anybody else without the personal permission of the person who that medical information is about. It sounds pretty simple that it ought to be part of our law. It appears to be such common sense that maybe we should not even have to deal with that; it is just common sense that nobody else should profit from your personal information without telling you about it and without your permission.
It is only fair--it seems to myself and to Senator TORRICELLI--to put that burden on the web site operator and not on the consumer. Medical information can be highly personal, and consumers face serious risk if it becomes a public commodity that can be bought and sold without the individual's consent. If that is allowed, then we are all at risk.
As far as your own personal information being a public commodity that can be sold--outside the fact that it shouldn't be done without your permission, not only to protect your privacy but you ought to know about the information being disseminated and to whom it is going, it is also the fact that personal health information, if it is a commodity, is under your personal, private property rights, and they ought to be protected just as personal property rights are protected under our Constitution.
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The Department of Health and Human Services is working on regulations to finalize medical privacy rules this summer. I understand that for the most part those rules would set up a mechanism so individuals would have to opt into the procedure of giving permission for their medical information to be disseminated--opting in meaning that you have to actually say, I give permission for my medical information to be used in such and such a way, as opposed to kind of an opt-out situation where your personal medical information will be disseminated unless you say it can't be disseminated. From that standpoint, the Department of Health and Human Services rules, which they say will actually come out this way, will be in agreement with the goals of our amendment. I see the need to allow the process in the Department of Health and Human Services to finish.
The current draft of our amendment explicitly will not interfere with those rules and the rulemaking process now going on, and it also does not apply to entities subject to those proposed rules, such as health plans and providers.
Our amendment gets at those commercial health web sites to which the protections of Health and Human Services rules will not apply. But having said that, our amendment is pending.
Having made clear that our amendment does not interfere with the Department of Health and Human Services rulemaking now going on, I want to put President Clinton on notice, if it turns out that the final Health and Human Services rules are inadequate from the standpoint of protecting the personal privacy of health information of individuals, having this amendment in the bill as a placeholder will provide those of us in Congress who are concerned about this issue of privacy of medical health information a vehicle to strengthen the HHS rules legislatively in the future if necessary. There should be ample time for that because realistically we all know that more work will have to be done on Internet privacy before final enactment.
Senator TORRICELLI and I are open to ideas on how to improve the amendment. But let me make clear that I am adamant on the point that people should have a basic right to control their medical information, and to control it from the standpoint of making a separate individual decision as to whether that information can be disseminated--not from the opposite point of view that if they fail to say it can't be used it can be legally disseminated. I believe that very strongly.
We all know there are special interests out there that do not agree with us. I happen to think they are wrong. I look forward to having this issue aired fully in the committee. We should protect citizens' most confidential information from those who misuse it. I suppose there is a lot of confidential information other than just medical information about an individual that we ought to be concerned about. But I can't think of anything more personal or that could be more destructive to the individual than medical information.
We should also arm our citizens to make a thoughtful and informed decision on how their health information will be used--even educating them about the possibility that because they use the Internet certain health information about them can be disseminated. I am not so sure that we don't take the use of the Internet and technology so much for granted today that we often don't think about what we are doing and what we are putting into it about ourselves, and who might be making use of that. It is important for us to be informed about the possibilities. Once we have done that, I think the American people can be assured that they can go online without having surrendered their privacy rights.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona.
Mr. KYL. Thank you, Mr. President.
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