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Caspers Banner Health has revoked at least one parents access to her childs medical records online now that the child is 12 years old, according to a tip sent this week to Cowboy State Daily.

Access to your childs account has been revoked, reads a screen shot of Banner Healths message to the parent. The reason for this is because the child is now between the ages of 12 and 17. Based on state law, a minor child may consent to certain treatments without parental consent.

Records of those treatments are protected, Banner Healths note continues, and may not be released to a parent without the minor patients consent.

Because the hospital cant separate those protected records out, it denied the parent proxy access to her childs patient account.

The parent still can request the childs medical records by going to a Banner Health hospital or clinic and completing a request for certain records, the note says.

It adds: We can limit access to records of treatment that may not be provided without the minors consent.

Banner Health,in response to Cowboy State Daily inquiries,sent an email roughly reiterating its note to the parent and referencing the 1998 Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act.

The act doesnt center around medical treatments;it was designed to protect children from data-mining websites by requiring disclosures and parental consent.

Because, Consent

A friend of Rep. Landon Brown, R-Cheyenne, sent him the note, which he in turnshared withCowboy State Daily.

Brown was concerned. He met with Banner Health leadership Thursday, and his concern swelled to frustration, he told Cowboy State Daily.

Theyre claiming now only the person who receives the treatment and consents to the treatment has access to medical records, said Brown of Banner Healths stance.

Brown said Banner Health leadership referenced the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which sets privacy standards in medical care.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reads HIPAA as promising privacy for children in situations where the child can consent to care on his own. The agency has codified its interpretation into regulation.

Brown said hes discussing that interpretation with attorneys and has asked Wyomings Legislative Service Office to look into the issue.

When it comes to childhealth care, the parent should have access to the records at all times, said Brown. Those parents are responsible for their childs wellbeing.

Brown or another legislator will likely bring a proposed remedy in the upcoming state legislative session, he said.

Plagues, Abortions, Emancipations And STDs

There are a few instances in Wyoming law wherein children have medical decision-making power, such as when a child is legally emancipated from his parents.

Wyoming law allows children to petition courts for special permission to get an abortion without a parents consent.

It also lets children consent to care for sexually-transmitted diseases.

During a public health emergency, the state health officer may subject a child to vaccination or treatment without consent if the childs parent cant be found and the treatment is necessary to protect public health or to protect the child, the law says.

Authorities can subject a mentallyill child to treatment during an emergency detainment situation if safety demands it.

Parents also can authorize medical autonomy for their children.

State law doesnt appear to promise medical records privacy for the child from his parents in those instances.

Seems Like Overkill

Banner Healths note indicates that parents can apply for records at a facility, but not access them in total online, and the hospital can restrict access if it identifies privacy issues under its federal consent interpretation.

Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander,calls thatoverkill.

It seems like overkill to restrict all records just in the case of these specific procedures where a child was allowed to go out on their own, said Case. Thats like one in 10,000 maybe. But say its one in 100youve got 99 out of 100 people (for whose sake) youre preventing parents from having their rights with their children.

Brown said the Casper facilitys online records system may be unable to separate out those exempted treatments,and Banner Health is sending parents to facilities in person so that a human, rather than a computer system, can determine which records the hospital deems shareable.

The legislator reiterated his disagreement with that stance, however.

Maybe A Glitch.

Or it could be a glitch, Republican Rep. Dan Zwonitzer,chairman of the House Labor, Health and Social Services Committee, told Cowboy State Daily.

Theyre looking into it, from what I understand, said Zwonitzer, adding that the topic may surface at next weeks meeting of his committee in Evanston.

(Theyre) just locking out the online portal, said Zwonitzer. Parents certainly have access to all their childs medical records up until the age of 18.

Zwonitzers conversations with hospital personnel so far have left him with the impression that the system has a glitch that Banner could fix.

But if theres something more there, well certainly discuss it with Banner Health and determine if any kind of statutory changes are needed, he said.

Working On This

That wasnt Browns impression at all. He characterized the hospital as doubling down on its reluctance to share some records with parents in cases allowing child consent.

Im just extremely disappointed in what their response was, said Brown. We will clearly be working on this.

The Whole Patient Population

Rep. Jeanette Ward, R-Casper, told Cowboy State Daily that Banner Health sent the same note to the whole patient population of children turning 12.

She shared Brown's frustration.

"I think it's ridiculous that a parent cannot have access to their 12-year-old's online medical records and yes, this needs to be remedied by law," said Ward.

She asserted that government, school districts and authorities other than parents are part of a societal erosion of parental rights, and said society should work to secure those rights instead.

"We can start by declaring that PARENTS are the primary stakeholders in their children's education and healthcare," said Ward in an emailed statement to Cowboy State Daily.

Clair McFarland can be reached at Clair@CowboyStateDaily.com.

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Ethical people do unethical things; thats human nature. We are always internally fighting against those forces that would tempt us in some negative way, and sometimes, our better angels dont win. There are many lessons in this vein we can learn from the tech boom as a result of the widespread adoption of the internet, the single greatest communication platform humanity has ever seen.

Innovation is awarded, expansion of business, and the reach to potential customers is unparalleled online, and with success in these two comes unfathomable wealth that potentially anyone with programming skill and some foresight can achieve, regardless of previous status. However, with the drive for expansion and accumulation of wealth comes serious questions about the ethics of how to best serve the public.

Big Tech and The Drive to Decline

The lesson learned by the elite tech wealthy is that they owe society nothing in terms of helping to secure and protect the democratic norms that have made many countries successful enough to support a burgeoning billionaire class. So when you bite the hands that feed you, how do we, as the collective hand, respond? Apparently, its to let them keep biting us harder.

Big Tech has created the structure that has allowed anger and autocracy to thrive in the name of innovation. They finally put all the nails in democracys coffin. Let me explain.

The previous nails helped to erode the core of what society was in the name of progress. The Amazons of the world decimated the competing small business sector, took innovative products, and weaponized them against us. The Alexa voice assistant and Ring Doorbell have data mined us, our children, and our neighbors. Amazon illegally stored childrens data indefinitely, violating multiple laws, including the Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act.

War Crimes, Genocide, Disinformation, Depression, and More Have Also Thrived Under Their Watch

Outside of illegally data mining us which made founder Mark Zuckerberg billions after he was caught, Facebook has; aided in literal war crimes, allowed genocide to occur in Myanmar, not been quick enough in policing live streams of rampaging gunmen, dropped a supercharger into foreign intelligence disinformation operations that have influenced elections around the world, harmed younger generations due to lack of policing of cyberbullying and introduced serious depression with an increase in suicides in the younger population. They also tried to cover up much of this in the name of profits.

Twitter, where civility has gone to die, was also illegally data mining its users and ramped up disinformation and anger. Now that Elon Musk has bought it and destroyed two-thirds of its value in less than a year, a once useful (though convoluted) user verification system was dismantled in favor of anyone who wanted to pay for verification without verifying. This led to a pharmaceutical stock market disaster after a fake but verified account that looked like the company declared to the world that insulin would be free from now on, which lost them billions of dollars in a single day. Spoofing of notable people and brands has been rampant, with a more recent case involving a sitting member of the U.S. Congress, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, successfully impersonated by a verified account.

Bots, often controlled by foreign governments, run rampant across these platforms. Yet, theyre somewhat reticent to stop it as the bots inflate the perceived numbers of users on the platform, which, in turn, motivates companies to advertise on their platforms. In the age of Generative A.I., those bots will be even harder to spot and mimic human behavior to the point where we may lose our reality.

The Acceleration of Societys Death Spiral

Weve been backsliding on social norms, decorum, discourse, and democracy for a few decades, but Big Tech is speeding this up like a drunk driver careening toward a tree.

Historically, these companies have little checks beyond infrequent slap-on-the-wrist government oversight. They all have ethics and safety teams dedicated to combating all of the negatives mentioned above, and this is where the final nail gets pounded in. During the pandemic, Big Tech went on a hiring spree to keep up with the demands of a growing user base working from home. Now that the world is past, or at least settled into the pandemic, the firings have started due to shareholder demand for better efficiency (meaning stop wasting money on too many employees).

What were the teams that got slashed the deepest or even closed? The Safety and Ethics teams. Wunderbar.

Facebooks team combating disinformation and misinformation had corporate buy-in in developing a new tool for fighting this onslaught and saw this needed project also cut along with their jobs. Under Musk, Twitter killed off their Human Rights, Security, and Public Policy teams. Amazons Twitch streaming platform fired their Responsible AI group, whose job was fixing the rampant racism and sexism on the platform. Alphabets Google also cut their Responsible AI team as well, and Google owns YouTube, the worlds largest self-sharing video site.

Societys Lack of Education on This Is a Clear Crisis

If the 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections have taught us anything, people are uneducated and fall for disinformation, spread it like wildfire with the help of algorithms, and cant be persuaded to understand what they just did and why its wrong. 2016 saw deep social divisions grow based on politically biased false evidence and narratives. 2020 took that division and widened it to the point where millions of Americans believed there was such an existential crisis in the government, society, and election that the only way to cure it was to storm the Capitol and stop a peaceful democratic process. Did all of these thoughts magically go away in the last year? Now, we are walking into a 2024 election with even fewer checks against the inevitable flood of disinformation we will be exposed to, thanks to Big Tech efficiency and the expanding use of A.I. to pump out fake news 24/7.

There are no easy answers here. Ive called for educating the general public on disinformation and logic, but honestly, that wont happen on any large scale. Besides shutting down social media platforms, the only solution is forcing them to have vast ethics and safety teams. That should be their cost of doing business. Honestly, they should want to help us here. An open society allowed them to thrive. Now its their turn to pay us back and help protect and rebuild the safeguards of democracy theyve damaged that ensure everyones freedom.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

An expert in cybersecurity and network infrastructure, Nick Espinosa has consulted with clients ranging from small business owners up to Fortune 100 level companies for decades. Since the age of 7, hes been on a first-name basis with technology, building computers and programming in multiple languages. Nick founded Windy City Networks, Inc at 19 which was acquired in 2013. In 2015 Security Fanatics, a Cybersecurity/Cyberwarfare outfit dedicated to designing custom Cyberdefense strategies for medium to enterprise corporations was launched.

Nick is a regular columnist, a member of the Forbes Technology Council, and on the Board of Advisors for both Roosevelt University & Center for Cyber and Information Security as well as the College of Arts and Sciences. Hes also the Official Spokesperson of the COVID-19 Cyber Threat Coalition, Strategic Advisor to humanID, award-winning co-author of a bestselling book, TEDx Speaker, and President of The Foundation.

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Democracy at Stake: The Unethical Path of Tech Giants ... - SMERCONISH

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MELBOURNE, June 15 (Reuters) - A global move to standardise reporting on environmental, social and governance issues could make the mining industry more investable and help attract talented graduates to the sector, private equity and industry sources said on Thursday.

The mining industry has struggled with some poor environmental and social legacies that have impacted its ability to recruit young talent for whom ESG issues are a major concern. As the industry improves its standards, proactive companies are likely to attract fresh capital, they said.

"One of the things that our investors look for, that is top of mind, now, is the whole ESG equation ... Standards are being raised around the world," said Owen Hegarty, executive chairman of resource-focused private equity firm EMR Capital, which holds some $5 billion under management.

"If you can have a shining ESG beacon in the night on your credentials ... you will certainly attract more capital than anyone else," he added, speaking at a mining conference in Melbourne.

New guidelines from the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) are the start of a wave of standardisation that will allow investors to quantitatively assess the ESG credentials of companies by sector and which the mining industry will ultimately be mandated to follow, said Aletta Boshoff, national ESG lead at advisor BDO.

"Comparable information is what investors want," she said.

Private equity has already put together standardised metrics, said Lauren McGregor, director at Resource Capital Funds, which had $2.5 billion under management at the end of March.

RCF is one of more than 325 private equity houses that have signed up to the ESG Data Convergence Initiative, which is creating standardised ESG metrics for the PE industry. Its signatories have combined assets under management $27 trillion.

"If we lean into it, it's a chance to make mining as a sector more investable," she said.

The sector can improve by seeking out and meeting the expectations of stakeholders early, not just those of shareholders but also governments, regulators and communities.

Miners that have been successful in various remote locations already have many of these standards built into their core operations, EMR's Hegarty said.

"It doesnt matter if youre in the Atacama or the red dust of Mt Isa, or the rainforests of north Sumatra .... Youve got communities. If they are not there when you show up, they will arrive eventually and their expectations, their requirements change over time," he said.

Managing environmental and social risks can be expensive but miners needed to look into what advantages ESG compliance could bring, said Steve Morgan, principal at corporate advisory Automic ESG.

One nickel company Automic ESG was advising was offsetting the costs of lowering its carbon footprint against an expected premium for its more sustainable product, he said.

"There is an upside for projects that have the right ESG credentials," Morgan said.

Reporting by Melanie Burton; Editing by Stephen Coates

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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A young Kiwi has shared the harsh reality of life as a fly-in-fly-out mining worker in Australia, an opportunity seen as a path to wealth by many.

Kieran Wealleans is an apprentice diesel mechanic but works long hours in a remote part of Australia with nothing to do outside work.

I work 11 hours a day, Monday to Sunday. I have no friends or family around me. I go home just to do the same repetitive cycle, Wealleans said on video-sharing social media platform TikTok.

I cant go for walks or anything cause the only thing is road that goes straight for three hours. I have f***-all service, but hey, at least the sunsets are cool.

In his video, which has been seen by more than 200,000 people since it was uploaded last month, Wealleans doesnt talk about the big money that entices workers - including many from New Zealand - to jobs in the mining industry.

But the average salary for fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) diesel mechanics is NZ$140,962, or just over $72 an hour, according to a story about the video on news.com.au

A normal day is 11 hours, but he usually did 13 due to overtime.

He worked three weeks on, one week off, Wealleans wrote in the comments section for his video.

It was hard to make friends because he worked alone and stayed in accommodation by himself in the middle of nowhere.

He hadnt chosen a FIFO role, Wealleans said.

My work just started doing FIFO and I dont have qualifications for anything else.

The video attracted hundreds of responses, many from current or former FIFO workers.

Some were understanding.

Thats why they call it the golden handcuffs we want out but the money keeps us in, wrote one.

Another wrote that FIFO feels like jail, while TikTok user Evan acknowledged the gig could get tough.

Important to stay out of bad habits and keep ya mind clear.

However, others were more forthright.

From one Kiwi who did FIFO to another youve got a choice dont like it, go home.

Kiwis have long sought the big bucks on offer for those willing to take on long hours and weeks at a time away from friends and family in remote locations across the ditch.

Mining revenues hit record levels in Australia last year - reaching NZ$496.8 billion, good news for New Zealanders cashing in on lucrative job opportunities.

Among them was a Kiwi miner with more than 30 years experience who told the Bay of Plenty Times Weekend he expected his wages would double to $180,000 a year - with potential to rise further - when he moved to Australia.

Not having to pay for accommodation, travel, or meals while working flying in and flying out on a two-week on and two-week off roster was a big attraction.

Ill come home on my two weeks off because there is more money to be made in Aussie and we are not keeping up.

Kiwis whod already made the move told the Bay of Plenty Times Weekend last month of high incomes that had allowed them to buy homes, investment properties, cars and toys, and they had financed frequent overseas holidays.

While some acknowledged the challenges of FIFO, the opportunities far outweighed them.

Former Whakatne pre-school teacher Gerri Mark now drives dump trucks in the mines in Western Australia after crossing the ditch in 2017 following a marriage break-up.

She earned $140,000 with four bonuses a year, had company health insurance, and worked 15 days on and 13 days off.

Ive made enough money to live an amazing life as an independent, single woman. I brought my first house two years ago and now Im looking at an investment property.

I paid cash for my Holden ute, I own everything in my house, I dont have a credit card and I pay cash for everything.

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Kiwis TikTok video lays bare the reality of working in Australian ... - New Zealand Herald

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