When you take a prescription drug, that's between you, your doctor and your pharmacist. No one else has a right to know.

Perhaps not for much longer.

Under legislation that quietly passed in the California Senate on May 29 (bill SB 1096) and is making its way through the Assembly, drugstores would be free to share patients' prescription records with companies that specialize in bulk mailings.

The ostensible rationale for the data sharing is that it would help consumers by providing letters reminding people to take their medication or refill a prescription.

The reality, critics say, is that this is an effort by pharmaceutical companies to help ensure that patients stick with expensive name-brand drugs and not stray toward cheaper generic alternatives. It also could lead to privacy violations.

"Your private medical information is being transferred from one database to another", said Jerry Flanagan of Santa Monica-based Consumer Watchdog. "Once that genie's out of the bottle, it's very hard to get it back in". The've also launched a campaign for fighting against this bill.

The creator of this Senate Bill says it has been misunderstood by the public, and particularly by journalists who failed to grasp its finer points. Contrary to some reports, he said, it wouldn't allow drug companies to send you pitches for their medicines in an attempt to get patients to switch from one brand to another.

Oh my! :-(

Read the rest of this tremendously intricate plot involving politics, drug makers, money and online privacy at David Lazarus' Consumer Confidential Blog (Los Angeles Times).

What's your opinion?

A fast tip: Many people send massive e-mails using standard e-mail software such as Outlook. This is a mistake, and not just because the time it takes, but also because the danger of sendig  the recipient’s list  if you aren’t careful with the fields that you use.

To avoid this, when we are  writing an e-mail message we can specify the recipients in any of the 3 following fields:

• To: field recipients are the audience of the message
• CC: (Carbon Copy) Recipients added to this field  are others whom the author wishes to inform of the message
• BCC: (Blinded Carbon Copy) Field recipients will discreetly  receive the e-mail and won’t see any of the other addresses.

So, if you send a massive mail using ‘To’ or ‘CC’, you will show all the adresses to all the recipients whom may consider you as a spammer. And this is not the worst: you may be going against the law, because you are publishing personal data.
 
Click on ‘To:’ or ‘CC:’ button to sort the addresses between the three fields:

 
You can also enable ‘BCC:’ field in Outlook 2007 by clicking on ‘Options’->’Show BCC’:

Anyway, the best choice for massive mails  is a specialized software as MAILCast, which will help you to manage, and hide ;-), all the addresses while saving up time composing and sending your e-mail.