I suppose right now there is no federal preemption - but I fully expect gym & similar lobbying at the federal level to get a rule in place to allow preemption challenges.
I think it's a good idea to learn how to work through those levels of abstraction, even if only academically, since it yields a lot of insight into why our current abstraction level is the way it is. I don't personally use git CLI on a day to day basis (I use a gasp GUI) but I know what a rebase is and how to recover from a variety of bad states using CLI alone during an emergency. Being aware of how commits actually works lets me know when I can rebase, squash and manipulate history in a safe manner and when such manipulations are likely to cause headaches to those around me.
The window of what steps technical people should understand in our stack of abstraction is always changing - there is no permanent window we should hold as sacred (outside of a cursory knowledge of the lowest of low levels - being passingly familiar with how machine code works is valuable to everyone) but the levels we should be aware of should exceed the levels that we casually interact with - we should at least be rather comfortable with the level one deeper than the one we often interact with.
The EU's position on privacy seems pretty consistent to me - they're against your data being monetized by private entities but not against building governmental tools to monitor private entities.
In good faith this could be summarized as "Personal data should be used for public safety but not for profit" - but that philosophy is definitely a strong contrast with the basic American philosophy towards civil liberties.
I am not certain what financials you were looking at but Twitter was unable to ever meet the debt servicing costs for the leveraged buyout alone. It also had overhead costs and other debts that were entirely out of scope for being covered.
I'm not - then again I didn't launch a image generation model advertised as having a spicy mode so that might have something to do with the coincidence.
Anyone handling PII needs to be trained in HIPAA compliance and authorized in the same manner as the doctor themselves. There is no explicitly separate HIPAA like law though if your handling of the information is limited to a particular subset of the information (e.g. knowing that a patient has an appointment with a renal specialist and knowing their address information but not knowing the topic of the appointment) then there may be a relaxation of the requirements - but patients are also blabby so usually they're treated like anyone else.
When it comes to AI note-taking or other AI services that interact with PII the exact same requirements and data handling standards need to be adhered to as if the tool was an employee with proper certified training (or, in the case of a tool, review and certification) and appropriate contracts and disclosures.
I can't really provide a more specific answer because the topic is so broad and while I'm familiar with the process from one end I am not an expert on the process in general.
You absolutely could build such a tool and I have seen HIPAA authorized model sandboxes that do definitely exist. However, most off the shelf note-takers would not so qualify and it's a minefield to build one with out of domain third party resources.
I think it's fair to say the non-technical public has been repeatedly burned by AI companies selling something different from what they're advertising and it's fair to be skeptical as a layperson about your ability to tell a properly HIPAA compliant tool from a non-HIPAA compliant tool.
Secretaries are compelled by the same privacy and disclosure laws as doctors - AI notetaking apps may or may not be (it'll take examination of the product on a case by case basis) and the public is, at this point, used to AI companies blatantly lying about privacy, confidentiality, training sources, reuse of conversations and pricing - the good faith is gone as a default and in a setting like a HCP that is a terrible place to start from.
This particular article concerns an AI notetaker being used in the context of healthcare - there is a well founded reason that health information is so stringently controlled which is to enable patient comfort at sharing potentially embarrassing or uncomfortable details. If you're receiving PT there is a large potential to feel shame over an inability to do things that were previously trivial[1].
Once upon a time the notes may have been recorded by a staff member of the doctor's office or by the doctor themselves (usually after the meeting). Budgetary constraints push HCPs towards cutting staff and those rolls are being replaced by AI and that is not okay.
Staff, Nurses, Doctors are all under the clear guidance of HIPAA and understand their responsibility towards patient privacy - it isn't a perfect system and there are notable disclosures and violations that have happened in the past but once third party systems are involved - especially non-deterministic third party systems - then the client's understanding of privacy may be severely compromised.
I love voice to speech and meeting summarization for thinking sessions with coworkers where maybe someone is motivated to take notes (and better participates through that action) but the emphasis is on everyone being present and being able to talk freely. The doctor's office is a fundamentally different environment, though.
1. Aside - an unnecessary shame - no one should feel guilt over trying to overcome a disability.
Don't buy the BS about them being overwhelmed by AI code when they've also had terrible vibe-coded feature rollouts repeatedly break the site and are trying to rapidly increase their feature surface to kill off competing test runners and review managers. Maybe github, if well managed, would struggle in the current day - but it simply isn't.
If you find yourself with an excess of books buy a bird house and set up a little library[1] somewhere in your neighborhood to outsource that storage and the knowledge contained in those books! I liberally loan books that I love out though the ones I really love go to homes I know will appreciate them.
1. Also called a loan-library in some areas - basically a box that random folks can put books into and take books out of without any strings attached.
I think by spelling out the process in this manner and then highlighting the absurdity of the first two steps your argument is defusing a lot of the bad faith responses that are likely to arise.
It does feel cumbersome to execute the argument in this manner but it feels rationally defensive.
I think it's fair to object to the point above on the basis that users have very little knowledge of how quickly batteries will fail and thus the cost of that failure is hidden from the market. It takes years or decades for consumer usage of devices to give new purchasers a fair picture of the hardware difficulties surrounding the battery - and, by then, there's a newer model with different qualities on the market.
A good number of users will never hit troubles with their battery since electronic devices are treated rather cavalierly and replaced before those defects will surface, so I object to the wording that all users will hit that - but I still think it's clearly in the best interests of the majority of consumers to bargain for better lifetime extension support.
Rather than using the coloring of "protected from themselves" I prefer to view consumer protection boards as a collectivized bargaining unit for the consumers as a whole. Similar to unions the deals they strike won't be maximally optimal for all workers but a good consumer protection agency can balance the concerns of consumers and bargain as a single entity with the company. Otherwise the imbalance of bargaining power makes it extremely difficult for change to be enacted.