Column We already live in a world where pretty much every public act – online or in the real world – leaves a mark in a database somewhere. But how far back does that record extend? I recently learned that record goes back further than I’d seriously imagined.
On my recent tour of the United States (making it through immigration checks in record time, thanks to facial recognition), I caught that bug, the same one that brought the world to a halt half a decade ago. But I caught it early, so I knew that I could probably get some treatment.
That led to a quick trip to an ‘Urgent Care’ – the frontline medical center for most Americans. At the check-in counter, the check-in nurse asked to see some ID, so I handed over my Australian driver’s license. The nurse looked at the license and typed some of the info on it into a computer, then they looked up at me and asked: “Are you the same Mark Pesce who lived at…?” and then proceeded to recite an address that I resided at more than half a century ago.
Dumbstruck, I said, “Yes…? And how did you know that? I haven’t lived there in nearly 50 years. I’ve never been in here before – I’ve barely ever been in this town before. Where did that come from?”
“Oh,” they replied. “We share our patient data records with Massachusetts General Hospital. It’s probably from them?”
I remembered having a bit of minor surgery as an 11 year old, conducted at that facility. 51 years ago. That’s the only time I’d ever been a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Somehow that had never been forgotten.
We seem perfectly willing to accept that everything we do today leaves a permanent record. It appears that long before Eric Schmidt declared, “Privacy is dead,” any of our pretensions to privacy had already joined the Choir Invisible.
The fine print of whatever forms my parents signed when admitting me to that hospital probably contained a clause that mentioned the hospital would be keeping my patient records on file. I don’t know if that meant my records inhabited massive stacks of filing cabinets housing neatly alphabetized patient records, before a later digitization project dredged them up.
There’s a slim chance my records were digital from the get-go because Massachusetts General Hospital prides itself as one of the leading medical research facilities in the world – it was the first facility to perform surgery under anesthesia. So perhaps it already kept electronic records when I visited all those decades ago.
I don’t much care how my records made it into 2025. I am interested in why nobody ever decided to delete them.
I realize we all want our medical records instantly available to inform treatment in moments of great need. But half a century of somewhat senseless recordkeeping strains credulity. Most likely my record remained in that database simply because it’s never been cleaned out – an operation that would take time and budget that would never be approved because, why would you ever delete patient data?
This has the feel of a situation we had no idea we were making for ourselves – countless sensible decisions culminating in a ridiculous outcome. Go forward another fifty years, when it’s quite likely I, too, will have joined the Choir Invisible. Will my patient record still be in that database? What purpose would that serve? If my records as a child are in there, half a century later, it’s easy to imagine this database holds records of many other people who have passed on and therefore shouldn’t be in there at all. Privacy lost to laziness.
My experience suggests that organizations need to regularly review their data sets to ask “Should this data be held indefinitely?” If they do, maybe we can find a way to let the past go – safely – so that we can preserve a shred of privacy? ®