At today’s AMIA Spring Congress, Adam Bosworth (VP, Google, Inc.) presented Google’s vision for the future of health care. An excerpt pulled from Mr. Bosworth’s notes suggests the following:
… consumers should own their own total personal health and wellness data (I’ll call it PHW for short) and that only consumers, not insurers, not government, not employers, and not even doctors, but only consumers, should have complete control over how it is used.
Is it just me, or is Mr. Bosworth forgetting a category in there? What about contextual advertising brokers?
I’ve already covered this topic in sufficient detail here, but seeing Google once again suggest that personal health data should flow to the consumer (by way of Google,) makes it clear they recognize no sense of personal privacy.
I’m all for Google’s efforts in content discovery / relevancy, but only as it relates to internet consumption. An individual’s health data has no place in an attention profile.
Note: in addition to pulp, I co-own a personal health assessment company. I’m really not sure if that influences my reaction.
4 Responses to “Google vs your privacy”
I am still amazed that people will use Google Mail, and let all their personal correspondences and conversations get readily indexed and monetized by Google.
Yeah, I use gmail for a small amount of correspondence. And I use google analytics, and adsense, and adwords, and google search… In all honesty, I don’t care if google recognizes my interests. But there’s a threshold.
If you have nothing to hide, then what’s the point of worring about your privacy. If the government wants to track you, then you will be tracked no matter what and in this case, I think Google is giving a helping hand to the government by indexing our lives on Google services.
Indexing is great. Again, though, they are the Internet’s largest advertising broker.