Wilder added that the information shared with law enforcement officials could not be overly broad or unrelated to the request. “There is a very broad exception to the HIPAA protections for law enforcement,” said Marcy Wilder, a partner and co-head of the global privacy and cybersecurity practice at Hogan Lovells, a law firm. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA - which governs the privacy of a patient’s health records - permits medical and billing records to be released in response to a warrant or subpoena. That means law enforcement officials can generally ask financial institutions to hand over customer data with a simple subpoena.Įven sensitive health and medical details can be fair game. But those protections weaken once individuals voluntarily share information with a third party, legal experts said. The Fourth Amendment provides individuals with protections against governmental intrusion. None of those have provoked the kind of political, legal and emotional pushback that abortion investigations are likely to. Card issuers have grown used to requests for user data in terrorism, money-laundering and illegal-trafficking investigations. The payment trail is likely to be a high priority.įor banks and other payments companies on the receiving end of criminal inquiries, this appears to be fairly new territory. Medical records are likely to be the most definitive proof of what now is a crime, but officials who cannot get those may look for evidence elsewhere. Now that abortion is illegal in several states, criminal investigators will soon begin their hunt for evidence to prosecute those they say violated the law. It’s a hypothetical question that’s almost certainly an inevitable one in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. So what will their credit and debit card issuers and financial app providers do when prosecutors seek their transaction data during abortion investigations? Digital payments are the default for millions of women of childbearing age.
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