Trend Longevity Rating
became core infrastructure in health care, often bigger than the book imagined
How this trend held up
If anything, the book understated this one. The "secondary data players" it warned about — social networks, app makers, and data brokers operating outside HIPAA's reach — are exactly the entities behind the decade’s biggest health-privacy scandals: the wave of period-tracking-app concerns after the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, repeated mobile health app data-sharing exposes, and the 23andMe breach of 2023, which compromised the genetic data of millions and became a multistate legal settlement. The HIPAA "loophole" the authors flagged — that most consumer health apps and wearables simply aren't covered by the law at all — is still, in 2026, the central unresolved regulatory gap in U.S. health privacy.
Every past trend prediction is re-reviewed and graded with a Trend Longevity Rating, measuring how much each originally curated trend still matters years later.
