The myth of selective sharing, or some thoughts on the future of digital health and activity data.
Text of 20130724 ted x-marc smith-digital health futures empowerment or coercion
Digital Health Futures: Empowerment or coercion Or, The Myth of
Selective Sharing Marc Smith
XBOX ONE, TELESCREEN ZERO Better than Orwell
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any
sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper,
would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within
the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be
seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing
whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or
on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual
wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched
everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your
wire whenever they wanted to. You had to livedid live, from habit
that became instinctin the assumption that every sound you made was
overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement
scrutinized.
Smith! screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. 6079
Smith W.! Yes, YOU! Bend lower, please! You can do better than
that. Youre not trying. Lower, please! THATS better, comrade. Now
stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.
To keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and even
your breathing could be controlled, with an effort: but you could
not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite
delicate enough to pick it up.
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you
were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The
smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious
look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself anything that
carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something
to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face
(to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was
itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in
Newspeak: FACECRIME, it was called.
COMPUTER SECURITY IS AN OXYMORON All health data should be
assumed world readable
Information that is not public and has not yet been destroyed
is just waiting to change to either state.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/baileyblack/1545504824/
http://www.fitbit.com/home https://jawbone.com/up
ACLU Pizza http://www.aclu.org/pizza/
Risky behavior will be priced in real time, 3rd glass of wine
tonight? Click here for a $20 extension for alcohol related injury
or illness. http://www.connectedaction.net/2009/02
/18/the-future-of-helath-insurance-
mobile-medical-sensors-and-dynamic- pricing/
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c1473442-a6f4-11de-bd14-00144feabdc0.html
Novartis chip to help ensure bitter pills are swallowed By Andrew
Jack in London Published: September 21 2009 23:06 | Last updated:
September 21 2009 23:06 technology that inserts a tiny microchip
into each pill swallowed and sends a reminder to patients by text
message if they fail to follow their doctors prescriptions. the
system which broadcasts from the chip in the pill to a receiver on
the shoulder on 20 patients using Diovan, a drug to lower blood
pressure, had boosted compliance with prescriptions from 30 per
cent to 80 per cent after six months.
Prediction: a mobile App will be more medically effective than
many drugs If only because it will make you take the drug
properly
Google Flu Tracker
Result: lives that are more publicly displayed than ever
before. Add potential improvements in audio and facial recognition
and a new world of continuous observation and publication emerges.
Some benefits, like those displayed by the Google Flu tracking
system, illustrate the potential for insight from aggregated sensor
data. More exploitative applications are also likely.
Information wants to be copied
The Myth of Selective Sharing Bits exist along a gradient from
private to public. But in practice they only move in one direction.
http://www.connectedaction.net/2011/07/25/the-myth-of-selective-sharing-why-all-bits-will-eventually-be-public-or-be-destroyed/
Secure links between people and content
are as strong as the weakest link
Cryptography weakens over time Eventually, private bits, even
when encrypted, become public because the march of computing power
makes their encryption increasingly trivial to break.
No one expects privacy to be perfect in the physical
world.
Patterns of connection may uniquely identify De-anonymizing
Social Networks Arvind Narayanan & Vitaly Shmatikov
http://33bits.org/2009/03/19/de-anonymizing-social-networks/
Abstract: Operators of online social networks are increasingly
sharing potentially sensitive information about users and their
relationships with advertisers, application developers, and
data-mining researchers. Privacy is typically protected by
anonymization, i.e., removing names, addresses, etc. We present a
framework for analyzing privacy and anonymity in social networks
and develop a new re-identification algorithm targeting anonymized
social-network graphs. To demonstrate its effectiveness on
real-world networks, we show that a third of the users who can be
verified to have accounts on both Twitter, a popular microblogging
service, and Flickr, an online photo- sharing site, can be
re-identified in the anonymous Twitter graph with only a 12% error
rate. Our de-anonymization algorithm is based purely on the network
topology, does not require creation of a large number of dummy
sybil nodes, is robust to noise and all existing defenses, and
works even when the overlap between the target network and the
adversarys auxiliary information is small.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/docsmith/4502313017
Information that is not public and has not yet been destroyed
is just waiting to change to either state.
Conclusions Selling selective exposure as a feature has
dangerous failure conditions. Assume public by default. It takes a
long time for mitigating technologies to catch up. Insurance
companies turn out to be the heros in the history of technical
risk.
Digital Health Futures: Empowerment or coercion Or, The Myth of
Selective Sharing Marc Smith