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Comment by jablongo

3 days ago

Interestingly in healthcare there is a correlation between companies that license/sell healthcare data to other ones (usually they try to do this in a revokable way with very stringent legal terms, but sometimes they just sell it if there is enough money involved) and their privacy stance... and it's not what you would think. Often it's these companies that are pushing for more stringent privacy laws and practices. For example, they could claim that they cannot share anonymized data with academic researchers, because of xyz virtuous privacy rules, when they are actually the ones making money off of selling patient data. It's an interesting phenomenon I have observed while working in the industry that seems to refute your claim that "there's no money in privacy". Another way to think about it is that they want to induce a lower overall supply for the commodity they are selling, and they do this by championing privacy rules.