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
