Walgreens is being sued by customers who are not happy that their prescription information – even though it has been de-identified – is being sold by Walgreens to data-mining companies.
The plaintiff group of customers is suing to share in the profits realized by Walgreens from trading in the de-identified data.
And healthcareitnews.com:
The suit cites Walgreen's 2010 annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which lists "purchased prescription files" as intangible assets worth $749 million.
Yet another example of the type of "ethical business practices" you can expect from Walgreens. One would think you could trust a pharmacy to protect your data and only hold on to it for the purposes of serving you as a customer / patient, not profiting off it by selling it to data mining companies. Oh hell, who are we kidding... this is Walgreens we're talking about.
