Privileged Information

FOR YEARS NOW—especially since the state's "HIV Reporting/Partner Notification Program" got underway in June of 2000—state and local officials have been scrambling to assure the public that their personal information, especially their medical records, will be kept in the strictest confidence. Your personal secrets may be in a database in Albany, but no one without the proper authorization will be able to access them.

It's a very comforting thing to hear, especially in this age of identity theft.

Over the past two years, however, hundreds of personal case files have been found free for the pickins in the garbage outside of city offices. Student records have likewise been tossed out on the street.

Last week, there was even more evidence that your personal information may not be quite as secure as you'd like to believe when it's in the hands of government officials. At least that's what a 38-year-old single mother living in Queens found out. And she's now suing the city for $50 million because of it.

She'd won a small claims settlement against a woman in her neighborhood named Beverly Gibson. But when she tried to collect, Gibson—who was working as a temp at the city's Human Resources Administration office—grew angry. Gibson not only got ahold of the woman's HRA personal case file; when the file revealed that the woman was HIV positive, Gibson started telling everyone in the neighborhood about it.

There are a number of details about the feud between these two women that were never clarified: What was the original small claims suit about, for instance, and why was the woman trying to collect the settlement from Gibson herself?

In the end, though, none of that matters. The content of the original suit doesn't matter. That she was a welfare mother doesn't matter. How she contracted HIV doesn't matter. What matters is that a temp with an axe to grind who was working at a city agency was able to get her hands on her enemy's personal and confidential file, uncover the woman's deepest secret and use it in an attempt to destroy her.

For some reason we're not feeling quite so comfortable anymore.