PAKISTAN IDENTITY THEFT AND OFFSHORE OUTSOURCING OF DATA DANGERSSPECIAL REPORT / Looking Offshore / Outsourced UCSF notes highlight privacy risk / How one offshore worker sent tremor through medical systemLooking Offshore

In an ongoing Chronicle series on the ramifications of shifting U.S. jobs and services overseas, this installment focuses on the threat to individual privacy when companies sendsensitive financial and personal data offshore. Read the complete series at www.sfgate.com/business/



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Lubna Baloch sat in her office in the sprawling Pakistani commercial center of Karachi and gazed at the e-mail she'd composed. She tried to imagine the reaction half a world away when the people at UC San Francisco Medical Center saw what she'd written.
The famous U.S. hospital would have to take her seriously, Baloch knew, when it realized she was prepared to post its confidential patient records on the Internet. That is, unless UCSF helped her get the money she was owed from the mysterious Tom Spires, her link in a long chain of medical transcription subcontractors.

"Your patient records are out in the open to be exposed," Baloch wrote in her e-mail, "so you better track that person and make him pay my dues or otherwise I will expose all the voice files and patient records of UCSF Parnassus and Mt. Zion campuses on the Internet."

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