They deployed Health AI on us: We’re bringing the rights & red teams
Andrea Downing
DEF CON 33 (backfill) · Day 1 · Main Stage
In this compelling DEF CON talk, Andrea Downing, co-founder and board president of the light collective, shines a critical light on the rapid deployment of Artificial Intelligence in healthcare, emphasizing the urgent need for patient rights and robust security red teaming. Downing, a seasoned advocate and "BRCA1 mutant hacker," draws upon her extensive experience in uncovering digital harms to highlight both the profound potential and the terrifying risks associated with health AI. Her organization, the light collective, is dedicated to advancing the rights, interests, and voices of patient communities in health technology, operating under the guiding principle of "no aggregations of representation."
AI review
Downing is a credible bridge-builder doing genuinely useful work at the intersection of patient advocacy and security — her Facebook scraping work and HHS OCR influence are real receipts. The survivorship-bias framing is intellectually honest and the prompt-injection-in-medical-imaging example lands, but the talk is more manifesto than technical contribution, and most of the security content is OWASP-citation depth rather than original research.