Data breaches are far more likely to expose sensitive personal or financial information, such as Social Security numbers, credit card numbers and birth dates, than they are to reveal very sensitive clinical information, a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found.^[1]

The study, which analyzed more than 1,500 breaches of protected health information that occurred over the last 10 years, looked at the personal details revealed about 169 million patients affected between October 2009 and July 1, 2019. It found that virtually every data breach included information such as names, email addresses or other personal identifiers.