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If Google already knows about your email, calendar, and documents, what happens when it knows about your prescriptions, diet, and medical history?
To find out, Nora talked to Steve Lohr. He’s a reporter with the New York Times, and has written about the coming launch of Google’s Health service. A shorter version of the interview will air on the February 20th episode of Spark (wiki), but you can hear the full interview above, or download the mp3.
By the way, there’s an interesting conversation going on in the comments of an earlier post on Google Health. Ben writes:
Generally speaking I think it is a good concept to attempt to give people more opportunities to gain knowledge related to their health and actively manage it. Working in the health care field we focus a lot of our efforts to promoting “wellness” and prevention, but often don’t provide the tools people need to do this in their lives.
and mt weighs in:
This just sounds like another way for google to help companies target there products directly at the people most likely to use them. … I can’t speak for anyone else, but I really don’t want my medical conditions to be used for marketing purposes.
What do you think? How much of your personal medical information are you comfortable putting online?
Google is a young enough company that I sit on the fence with them, but when the conversation turned to talking about Microsoft’s work in health my views become very clear. This is a company that has always claimed that their “intellectual property” is valuable and should be very strongly protected, but everyone elses intellectual privacy http://www.intellectualprivacy.ca/ or other rights have no value and are not worthy of protection.
I found it interesting that privacy was largely pushed aside with suggestions of “who really wants to access this anyway”, or that if someone wanted to break into something they would break into a bank. Money isn’t everything, and many people would be far more morally offended if details of their medical history were distributed than if some money were stolen. One is about who you are, and the other only about what you can buy.
It is interesting that privacy is devalued even though this information clearly has economic value. And if this knowledge has economic value to an aggregator, why not economic value for the actual “owner”?
Why does this privacy knowledge not receive as a minimum the same level of legal protection as Copyright? It is now a crime to use a camcorder in a theater and the government plans to fast-track Copyright legislation, and yet when personal data is leaked there is almost nothing being done to hold people responsible.
I had a really interesting conversation about privacy the other day…wondering whether, culturally,we are seeing a shift from thinking of privacy as an right or absolute value, to thinking of it as something that you swap in exchange for valuable services. It’s a generalization, but I think it’s mostly true that the generation ‘growing up digital’ doesn’t have the same sense of ‘right to privacy’ that other generations do.
I think there is a lot made about what different generations think. We send young people to war as they believe they are invincible and will be far more likely to take risks that adults never would.
The question isn’t what a teen thinks today, but what they will think in 20 years.
I believe that the issue isn’t privacy, but control. We need the right to make our own choices about who has access to our data. I don’t believe people are consciously exchanging privacy for valuable services, but in many cases assuming privacy is protected until after they feel violated and it is too late. Most people never look at how these companies really make their money, or read the legal fine print.
And why is it that “intellectual property” is allegedly of increasing value, but “intellectual privacy” is decreasing value? Seems that there is some extreme special interest thinking happening here in the case of some corporations.
What about people who would rather just pay the money for these services — will they even be offered that choice? The reality seems to be that you have to pay multiple ways to get various services, and we end up getting absolutely no value in exchange for the lost privacy (IE: Facebook and Google are paid for by advertisements, and the giving up of privacy is for $free).
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