How do I compellingly advocate for my privacy with doctors and other healthcare professionals?

PurpleDime:

I don’t expect answers with a string of technical jargon. I expect basic answers that people who are front-facing should know.

That is exactly my point (which I tried to emphasize with that XKCD comic): you’re not asking for basic answers. You’re asking extremely complex questions , which require in-depth technical IT knowledge, which the receptionist is highly unlikely to have at hand without consulting their IT (which, as you seem to say, does not exist).

• Simple answer would be “Our e-mail communication with patients is confidential”, which seems to be what you’re getting, yes?

• Significantly more advanced answer would be "Our e-mail communication with patients is confidential, and is being protected by technical measure of using modern Ed25519/AES-256 encryption ciphers between our and your e-mail servers, which prevents eavesdropping by unauthorized 3rd parties in between them"

• But the answers you seem to be wanting are waaay beyond even that , and would require receptionist to know not only the difference between how MUA and MTAs exchange messages (e.g. how the security of the message stored on local folder differs from one stored on the IMAP folder), but also why certain ways of doing encryption (e.g. transport encryption via SMTP STARTTLS between servers) which do protect against eavesdropping by unauthorized third parties, has certain disadvantages compared to end2end e-mail encryption like S/MIME or ASCII-armored OpenPGP) (which protects data even from authorized 3rd parties, i.e. e-mail storage servers like Google’s)

Sure, such things might seem easy to you and me, but I’m quite convinced that for average receptionist those would be utterly incomprehensible; you might’ve as well asked her in Klingon.

Not to say that I approve of them not knowing (or at least, of them not having a contact where they could get answers to such questions) – to the contrary.

But I’m just trying to outline why you seem to be getting confused looks from the receptionist.

PurpleDime:

If you’re a real estate agent, I don’t expect you to be an expert on construction, but I expect you to have some basic knowledge of the house you’re selling.

Basic, yes. E.g. “does the house have electricity in all rooms” is basic question, which real estate agent is likely to know.

But asking “Is electricity provided by TN-C, TT, or TN-S system, and is the bathroom water heater shock-protection provided by double-isolation, bootleg ground or RCD (and if RCD, at which leakage current threshold in mA)” might leave many real-estate agent somewhat overwhelmed.[1]

And you seem to be asking the equivalent of the latter, not the former.

1. BTW, What you want for good anti-shock protection is obviously TN-S + 30mA RCD + double-isolation; surely EVERY real-estate agent knows at least that, right? ↩︎