Europe-headquartered Global Privacy Assembly (GPA) has announced that NPC chair Raymund Liboro will lead a Covid-19 Taskforce that will drive practical responses to privacy issues emerging from the pandemic.
Even as it asked Covid-19 patients to truthfully disclose their health status to protect medical frontliners, the DOH assured that their data will only be divulged to public health authorities and health care providers for purposes of contact tracing and management of the disease.
The NPC said the breach notifications involved the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive personal information of suspect, probable, and confirmed Covid-19 patients.
The National Association of Data Protection Officers of the Philippines (NADPOP) said it should be the sole discretion of a Covid-19 patient whether or not to disclose his or her health information.
The National Privacy Commission stressed that even in times of calamity or a state of a public health emergency, privacy rights “remain in effect and upholding them equate to protecting lives.”
Today, as we are in community quarantine and as we practice social distancing, telemedicine may be the answer to the need of patients seeking consult but unable to travel or unwilling to take the risk of additional exposure to the novel coronavirus.
The NPC said revealing the identities of Covid-19 patients to the public or providing information that could accurately identify people who are under investigation or have contracted the disease is counter-productive and could do more harm than good.
The Philippines has formally joined the Cross-Border Privacy Rules (CBPR) System, a move seen to expand its trading opportunities within the Asia Pacific region by eliminating data-flow barriers when transacting with APEC member economies through the adoption of common standards for data privacy.
