By Eve Maler, Interim CTO, ForgeRock
- Healthcare patients will be able to share and redact their data in 2020.
2020 will be the year healthcare IT moves from data privacy 1.0, which focuses primarily on data protection, to data privacy 2.0, which fully includes data transparency and data control. The consumer experience of health plan members will be a huge focus in the coming year, along with building superior experiences in connected health, IoT and patient control of data sharing. In today’s digital world, it is essential for organizations to provide consumers with access to a consolidated view of their health-related data while giving them the ability to leverage their valuable data across multiple platforms.
As consumers move toward both a personalized experience while seeking a real measure of privacy, health providers and plans must go beyond keeping their patients’ and members’ personal health data safe and provide meaningful options for control. We will see the intersection of healthcare identity management and data security come to a head as providers seek to build trust with members. Providing patients with the ability to share, unshare, and withhold from sharing data will become a reality in 2020.
- The impact of Open APIs will broaden and deepen in financial services, healthcare, and telco.
What is an Open API? It’s a sector-specific set of application programming interfaces designed to enhance security, privacy, consent, data portability, and interoperability, to address regulatory imperatives and stimulate service provider and app ecosystems for the mutual benefit of people and businesses.
Open APIs in financial services were said to have lost steam; instead, they will globalize in 2020 with a regulatory scope that is now global, including Open Banking in the UK, PSD2 in the EU, the Australian Consumer Data Standards, the US Financial Data Exchange, financial bodies in Japan and Hong Kong, and more. Every region of the world is seeking to benefit and is cycling fast on the latest standards.
The Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) API has been around for a longer time than Open Banking, but adoption is only now truly accelerating. With healthcare spending accounting for 18% of US GDP and with payers under pressure to manage costs along with all ecosystem participants urged to open up data access, it will be the next industry to take advantage of Open APIs in 2020. Adopting Open APIs enables offering more consumer journeys, such as smartphone access to and sharing of health data, at a lower cost and with greater security and privacy because elements such as consent, encryption, and stronger authentication can be required or built-in so that they work cross-system.
- Tech giants will start to be regulated as “dark patterns” in 2020.
In 2020, governments are going to continue to put pressure on the tech giants, which will respond by trying to self-regulate to overcome increasing laws that threaten their business models. The privacy hits are going to continue for social and tech giants and they are going to continue to prove that they don’t deserve consumers’ trust.
In 2019, Facebook received a $5B fine for prior violations of user privacy. The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice are already investigating Facebook as part of a broader federal review of tech giants and leaning towards more robust action this time around. A unified federal-level push to regulate privacy is coming, essentially a U.S.-wide version of the Digital Single Market goal of GDPR, extending outward from the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
The big social networks have more to fear than privacy laws. Greater attention will be paid to dark patterns in 2020, which will encourage legislators and regulators likewise to pay broader attention to antitrust and consumer protection threats. Consumers will not leave their social networks in 2020, but we’ll see increased consumer protection laws as a result.
About the Author
Eve Maler is ForgeRock’s Interim CTO. She is a globally recognized strategist, innovator, and communicator on digital identity, security, privacy, and consent, with a focus on fostering successful ecosystems and individual empowerment. She founded and leads the User-Managed Access (UMA) standards effort and provides expert advice to forums such as Open Banking. Previously Eve co-invented the SAML and XML standards.
