The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is looking into how and why over 3,000 Floridians’ confidential prescription drug information ended up in the hands of third parties without their knowledge or consent.
On Tuesday, ACLU sent a public records requests to the Florida Department of Health and the Seminole County’s Sheriff’s Office seeking answers.
The prescription drug information of about 3,300 Floridians which landed in the hands of third parties, was stored in the Electronic Florida On-Line Registry of Controlled Substances Evaluation (E-FORSCE), a state-wide prescription drug database, the ACLU said. Ultimately it was distributed to prosecutors and defense attorneys in six criminal cases pending in Volusia County, Florida, the ACLU added.
“The private medical information of more than 3,000 Floridians—namely what prescription drugs they take, the dosage, their date of birth, address, and the name of the pharmacy that dispensed the prescription, ended up in the hands of third parties who simply have no legal right to know which law-abiding citizens are taking which prescribed medications,” stated ACLU of Florida Associate Legal Director Maria Kayanan. “We want to know how this monumental breach of security and confidentiality occurred, and how a State-mandated database could apparently be so misused that it led to the widespread distribution of intimate medical information unconnected to any ongoing investigation.”
The public records requests sent by the ACLU of Florida to the Florida Department of Health and to the Seminole County Sheriff’s office, seek records relating to requests made by local or federal law enforcement agencies, or inter-agency task forces, to the E-FORSCE database.
“As we’ve seen time and time again, and as made apparent by recent national news, government databases that collect personal information about us inevitably become sites for abuse and mistakes that can compromise our privacy,” continued Kayanan. “The maintenance of this database is bad enough, but without effective safeguards in place to protect our right to privacy under the Florida Constitution and federal law, breaches like this are inevitable. We want to determine how those safeguards in Florida failed, or if indeed they exist at all.”
