“Unregulated digital technologies, mass surveillance, and weak privacy laws have created a health privacy crisis,” the report says. “Our health data is increasingly being harvested, sold, and used beyond our control.”The organization found that health data routinely escapes medical settings and gets repurposed for surveillance and enforcement and is increasingly deterring patients from seeking care. This data is often collected outside traditional health care settings—through apps, websites, location tracking and online searches—and can be repurposed for advertising, insurance risk scoring, or government surveillance without patients’ knowledge or consent. The report warns that those practices have public-health consequences, particularly for people already wary of surveillance or government scrutiny. “We face a health privacy crisis where care is inaccessible due to criminalization, costs, stigma, and the rise of government intrusion into medical care which forces people to delay or retreat from care, worsening their health,” says Sara Geoghegan, senior counsel at EPIC.