For the US folks, your credit card transactions, prescription drug info, medical tests ordered (not results), the web sites you visit, searches you make, email content, along with essentially everything else you do in life is for sale to whoever can pay.So you don't really care that your personal information is being collected and possibly distributed without your knowledge and express consent?
Some data is (theoretically) anonymized, though often poorly and unprofessionally. The rest is left up to the purchaser to "use responsibly". Catching someone using the data unethically is nearly impossible, as the whole area is largely unregulated outside of health care. The people who collect and store the information don't necessarily have the drive to protect the information they collect, they're unregulated so you're depending on their bean counters' cost\benefit analysis on how much to protect your personnel information.
Why don't you see this on the news? Great question without an answer that doesn't make you look like a member of of the tin foil hat 'o' the month club.
This area is a much larger concern to me than some govt entity might be monitoring some tiny percentage of phone communications, along with most of the other 'crisis of the week' items you see on the news.
