Larry Page: You Worry Too Much About Medical Privacy

What reason do you possibly have to look at another person's medical history unless you are a physician or are put into a situation where you have to make medical decisions for another person? It's one thing to decide to share something if you feel it might be beneficial to help raise awareness (see Angelina Jolie) or if you're in an important position where people might have money riding on your health (see Steve Jobs or Larry Page) and a case could be made for ascertaining that you are healthy, but otherwise, there's no good reason.

I don't want to come off as some tin-foil hat wearing nut-job, but one can't help making a connection between Google wanting to know as much information as possible about a person to influence search results and Page's comments.

I just think there's no good reason to open up if people don't want to. There are a lot of things that could be stigmatizing in a person's medical history and open them all to all kinds of forms of discrimination outside of being able to get health insurance. Things as simple as "Oh, you had an abortion once. You're not welcome here."

And for what it's worth, I'd like to see better privacy laws in place. The kind of data that companies are so easily able to gather these days is getting out of hand is probably going to lead to an entirely new set of problems in the future. For example, it's already been proven possible to out a gay person [firstmonday.org] by analyzing their friends on social networks. If the world were a better place that wouldn't be a big deal, but it isn't. I'm reminded a short story [blogspot.com] where information gathering becomes so sophisticated that computers are able to generate targeted ads to influence a person in a single regard:

?Push combs the online footprint of our targets to determine everything we can about them,? said Yaroslava. ?We use social networks, we use search histories, we use cell phone data, we use gaming protocols. All data is useful to us. Not only do we find out exactly what our target likes to consume, but we also find out how they like to consume it. We see how they browse to determine their specific attention spans and intelligence. We scan their pornography habits to learn about their libido, their obsessions, and their fears. We aggregate vast amounts of data about the way they use the internet to create a complete psychological profile of our targets, and then we use cognitive behavioral techniques to triangulate patterns in this profile. We make as robust a model of their operating intelligence as we possibly can. And then we make little movies meant only for our specific subjects. We make movies designed to steer them toward our products, whatever these products may be. These movies are designed to make each subject breathless, pliant, confused, over-stimulated, and highly amenable to suggestion.?

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/yHgR7OIuIQQ/story01.htm

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