EHIP

Google needs to be more open, author of new book says

In a short 10 years, Google Inc. has become one of the most valuable companies in the world, and certainly the hottest commodity on the internet.

Along the way, the company that started out as a simple search engine provider has expanded into other businesses --- news, maps, e-mail, productivity software, as well as many others --- and has revolutionized virtually every industry it has touched.

Randall Stross, a professor of business at San Jose State University and author of the New York Times column Digital Domain, looks at the company's transformation into a massive agent of change in a new book titled Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know.

I don't bandy about the word 'evil' in the book but I do cover the history of the inclusion of 'do no evil' in their mission.

The proposed ad deal with Yahoo has drawn a lot of criticism.

I recently took a close look at that and decided it would be a deal that would really help Yahoo because ads are priced not by the provider but by a bidding process.

This is not something that seems immediately evil.

However, I am greatly concerned with the way Google does not provide full reassurance that the data it is collecting, including very personal data --- e-mail, word processing documents, medical records if we use Google Health.

All of this information is being collected by a company that has been reluctant to acknowledge how sensitive this material is and how great of a concern privacy protection is for many people.

Their all-purpose reassurance is, 'trust us, we know that our business depends upon maintaining the trust of our users so we have every incentive to take good care.'

They're going to need to change their relationship with their users and become more transparent.

CBCNews.ca: They've also been raked over the coals for their censorship in China and possible privacy invasion with Street View.

It faced a really tough question and was quite open about how it weighed the pros and cons of giving in to the Chinese government's demands that it censor Google search results, or if it didn't give in, accept that the government would restrict Chinese users from reaching Google servers outside of China.

Within the company, is there a real hatred for Microsoft?

Stross: There's no question that Google sees the biggest opportunity for growth is mobile access to the internet.

There's a whole new category of phones now, beyond the smartphone, that is designed from the ground up to interact with web services.

We're going to look back 10 years from now and think of desktop computing as a kind of strange, very limited way of having computing at our fingertips, like a ball and chain.

Google Video was a failure while YouTube exploded.

Automated summary from: CBC

Data leak fears 'holding back' health services

Lord David Lipsey told a fringe meeting at the Labour conference in Manchester on Monday that the government should make a strong defence of the advantages IT developments can deliver.

'I think people are so worried about the downsides because they haven't been inspired enough about the possibilities,' she said.

Automated summary from: healthcarerepublic

USA PATRIOT Act poses no serious threat to Canadian data, professor says

Information on Canadian citizens should be safe from the reaches of the USA PATRIOT Act, but the Canadian government's response to the Act may pose a greater threat to data privacy, a leading Indiana University School of Law--Bloomington cybersecurity expert testified today (Sept. 25) in Washington, D.C.

Print-Quality Photo Fred H. Cate, Distinguished Professor and C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law, told the Trilateral Committee on Transborder Data Flows that the Canadian government is taking a pragmatic approach to protecting its citizens' data from being accessed by the U.S. government.

But Cate, who also serves as the director of the IU Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, said the approach of some Canadian provinces is causing unintended consequences.

Generated higher costs for providing services to provincial governments and Canadian citizens without allowing access to globally centralized facilities, data, and personnel.

Increased potential harm to the public by denying Canadians access to non-Canadian fraud detection and identity verification tools, and cross-border data-matching servers that enhance the accuracy of records, help identify and locate criminals, enhance security, and limit the spread of infectious diseases.

Automated summary from: Indiana University

Privacy concerns need refocusing

The most recent example of this has been the steadfast refusal of the government and Health Department officials to inform the public of even the community in which a senior died of listeriosis after eating tainted meat at a nursing home.

There are no true privacy issues in that decision, nobody wants the senior's name or medical charts, but there is a public interest in knowing what nursing home put its occupants at risk and what it has done about it.

Automated summary from: Times & Transcript

CIHR research scam alert

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has been informed of fraudulent advertisements being posted on online classifieds web sites such as Craigslist.com and Kijiji.com, as well as on posters in the Vancouver area.

In these advertisements, the author claiming to be a CIHR employee named "Chelsea" invites people to participate in a research study.

Automated summary from: CIHR

Trend to privacy seen as hurting research

As Canadians place more and more emphasis on safeguarding personal privacy, the trend is taking an inadvertent toll on medical research, often impeding access to intimate but crucial health information, scientists are warning.

"I think it's something that everyone should consider because good research is basically how we make advances in public health," said Anne Harris, lead author of the paper.

Dr. Tu noted that Ontario has taken steps to help medical researchers by allowing certain organizations, such as the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) where he works, to access health records anonymously.

But even in Ontario some health agencies still interpret the rules more restrictively than the privacy legislation itself, and the obstacles are more onerous in other provinces, he said.

Many researchers in Canada are simply deprived access to databases of health information -- such as medicare or hospital records -- even when the patients' identities are wiped from the data, Dr. Tu said.

Harris's paper focused on studies where researchers want to interview a group of randomly selected patients, perhaps with cancer, and compare them with a control group of healthy individuals, often to try to explore possible triggers for a disease.

The UBC researchers prepared simulations that looked at the effect of various degrees of bias, and found that even when the bias was relatively small, the results of the study are considerably distorted.

Automated summary from: The National Post

GAO Report Finds HHS Lagging in Defining Process for Health IT Privacy

A Government Accountability Office report released Wednesday found that HHS has made some progress in developing a coordinated health information technology system but has not defined a process for prioritizing and assessing privacy issues related to a nationwide network of electronic health records, CongressDaily reports (CongressDaily, 9/18).

Automated summary from: Medical News Today

Debunking Google's log anonymization propaganda

Google announced on Monday that the company will be reducing the amount of time that it will keep sensitive, identifying log data on its search engine customers.

Today, we're announcing a new logs retention policy: we'll anonymize IP addresses on our server logs after 9 months.

We're significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to improve privacy for our users.

After nine months, we will change some of the bits in the IP address in the logs; after 18 months we remove the last eight bits in the IP address and change the cookie information.

We're still developing the precise technical methods and approach to this, but we believe these changes will be a significant addition to protecting user privacy....

It is difficult to guarantee complete anonymization, but we believe these changes will make it very unlikely users could be identified....

When a user conducts a search using Google's search engine, the company stores three main types of information in a log file: the user's IP address (which is a unique network address given to her computer by her Internet service provider), the words that she searched for, and her cookie identifier (a unique value given to every Web-browser that visits a Google Web-property).

While the company hasn't said how it de-identifies the cookies, it has revealed in public statements that its IP anonymization technique consists of chopping off the last 8 bits of a user's IP address.

Even though the 9-month-old search logs have been "anonymized", because the cookie values remain, it is trivial to match the newer search results to the older searches, and thus completely reverse the anonymization process.

Automated summary from: CNET.com

Consumer control over personal medical data is coming to Canada

Beta versions of Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault - both examples of new personal health record (PHR) technology - were launched last year.

These free software products allow consumers to store and manage their personal medical data in structured repositories online.

Some institutions allow access via patient portals, but patients don't control their own data, and can't transfer it electronically to other providers.

HealthVault is a "cloud" service, which means personal repositories of healthcare information are set up with data feeds on the Web rather than on a person's local PC, explains Conn.

Microsoft has already negotiated agreements to build connections for data-sharing with major American healthcare providers such as the Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente, and is in discussions with many others.

"They're realizing that building all the applications they want to deploy to users is too much for any one institution, so they're tying into what we're building."

Microsoft is also working with Canada Health Infoway, which is developing and promoting the architecture for a national electronic health record (EHR) system across Canada, he says.

Infoway recently announced that it is in discussions with various vendors offering PHR software to ensure products offered in Canada conform to its EHR blueprint, and contain proper security and privacy mechanisms.

"We're working with Microsoft, Google and other vendors who are serious about coming into the Canadian market to ensure they fully understand some limitations.

So if they recognize our requirements about having data centres in Canada and ensuring privacy and security, then there can be a happy marriage with US- based vendors coming here and enhancing our EHR offerings with their PHR offerings."

Automated summary from: Intergovworld

2 million credit reports plundered

Nearly 2 million customers of Countrywide Financial Corp., including thousands of Staten Islanders, are at risk of identity theft after a shocking breach of security: A senior executive allegedly stole loan applicant information and peddled it to a third party.

Countrywide this week notified its customers that Social Security numbers, addresses and financial information associated with each person's mortgage loan had been compromised.

Hollander, who deals with dozens of clients each week having accounts with Countrywide, said he believes anyone affected should receive free lifetime credit monitoring services, at the very least, especially since the information released stays with the client forever.

Two Countrywide customers filed suits against the lender and its parent company last month in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, accusing Countrywide and Bank of America for failing to protect customers' sensitive information.

Automated summary from: SILive.com