deal but you were confused on. HIPAA means Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. In your defense it's a understandable confusion if most of the privacy you have interacted with or heard about has been related to HIPAA. For example if you work in healthcare then any information that could connect a patient to their care is protected under HIPAA. Referring to HIPAA for anything other than health information is incorrect though.

Just this week I had a medical billing person in our organization helping me with an employee document and I asked her to redact the personal information from the employee file. Later she told me that she had removed the HIPAA information. I had no idea what she was talking about because the project had nothing to do with health information but via more conversation I realized she was confusing it with private personal information and thinking it was also protected under HIPAA since that is the world of privacy she works in.

Without context it's an innocent mistake but one that is still entirely inaccurate. I think you have been dealt with a bit harshly here but it probably proceeded that way when you doubled down. With context I hope you can see the humor in calling personal information related to ownership of a car a HIPAA violation. Thus this great comment: "You must do quite different things at your local auto dealer than I do."