A Letter from the Founders

To our fellow privacy advocates,

Several years ago, while conducting research for a healthcare AI project, we found ourselves in conversations with the nation's largest health data brokers—an industry that most Americans don't know exists, yet one that sells health information on hundreds of millions of patients annually.

What we discovered fundamentally altered our understanding of healthcare privacy in America. These companies would invariably begin our conversations by emphasizing their commitment to patient privacy through "de-identified" data practices. However, in those same discussions, they would routinely recommend third-party services that could re-connect this supposedly anonymous health information to comprehensive personal profiles, including financial records, purchasing behavior, and social media activity.

This contradiction revealed a troubling reality: the current healthcare privacy framework isn't designed to protect patients—it's designed to enable a multi-billion dollar industry built on the systematic commercialization of our most sensitive personal information. While data breaches make headlines, they represent only the visible symptoms of a much larger structural problem.

We assumed this market failure would have attracted solutions from privacy-focused companies. Instead, we found advocacy organizations, policy researchers, and legal experts analyzing the problem, but no one providing practical tools for individuals to exercise control over their own health data.

HealthConsent was born from this gap in the market. We built the privacy protection platform we wished had existed when we first encountered this industry—one that puts individuals back in control of their most personal information.