A penny for your marketable thoughts?
Most people think that Apple's Siri is the coolest thing they've ever seen on a smart phone. It certainly is a milestone in practical human-machine interfaces, and will be widely copied. The combination of deep search plus natural language processing (NLP) plus voice recognition is dynamite.
And Siri also marks a new milestone in privacy invasion. I predict Siri will become the poster girl for PII piracy, the exemplar of the sly bargain for Personal Information at the heart of most social media.
If you haven't had the pleasure ... Siri is a wondrous new function built into the latest iPhone. It’s the state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence and NLP. You speak directly to Siri, ask her questions (yes, she's female) and tell her what to do with many of your other apps. Siri integrates with mail, text messaging, maps, search, weather, calendar and so on. Ask her "Will I need an umbrella in the morning?" and she'll look up the weather for you – after checking your calendar to see what city you’ll be in tomorrow. It's amazing.
Natural Language Processing is a fabulous idea of course. It radically improves the usability of smart phones, and even their safety with much improved hands-free operation.
An important technical detail is that NLP is very demanding on computing power. In fact it's beyond the capability of today's smart phones, even if each of them alone is more powerful than all of NASA's computers in 1969!. So all Siri's hard work is actually done on Apple's mainframe computers scattered around the planet. That is, all your interactions with Siri are sent into the cloud.
Imagine Siri was a human personal assistant. Imagine she's looking after your diary, placing calls for you, booking meetings, planning your travel, taking dictation, sending emails and text messages for you, reminding you of your appointments, even your significant other’s birthday. She's getting to know you all the while, learning your habits, your preferences, your personal and work-a-day networks.
And she's free!
Now, wouldn't the offer of a free human PA strike you as too good to be true?
Indeed it would. So realise this about Siri: she's continuously reporting back to Apple about your every move. If Apple were a PA placement agency, what they get in return for the free secretarial services is a full transcript of all you've said, everyone you've been in touch with, everything you've done. Apple won't say what they plan to do with all this data, how long they'll keep it, nor who they'll share it with. Apple's Privacy Policy (dated October 2011, accessed 12 March 2012) doesn't even mention Siri nor the collection of the voice-to-text data.
When you dictate your mails and text messages to Siri, you’re providing Apple with content that's usually off limits to carriers, phone companies and ISPs. Siri is an end run around telecommunicationss intercept laws.
Of course there are many, many examples of where free social media apps mask a commercial bargain. Face recognition is the classic case. It was first made available on photo sharing sites as a neat way to organise one’s albums, but then Facebook went further by inviting photo tags from users and then automatically identifying people in other photos on others' pages. What's happening behind the scenes is that Facebook is running its face recognition templates over the billions of photos in their databases (which were originally uploaded for personal use long before face recognition was deployed). Given their business model and their track record, we can be certain that Facebook is using face recognition to identify everyone they possibly can, and thence work out fresh associations between countless people and situations accidentally caught on camera. Combine this with image processing and visual search technology (like Google's "Goggles") and the big social media companies have an incredible new eye in the sky. They can work out what we're doing, when, where and with whom. Nobody will need to like expressly "like" anything anymore when Facebook can see what cars we're driving, what brands we're wearing, where we spend our vacations, what we're eating, what makes us laugh. Apple, Facebook and others have understandably invested hundreds of millions of dollars in image recognition start-ups and intellectual property; with these tools they convert the hitherto anonymous image collections in Picassa, Flickr and the like into content-addressable PII gold mines. It's the next frontier of Big Data.
Now, there wouldn't be much wrong with these sorts of arrangements if the social media corporations were up-front about them. In their Privacy Policies they should detail what Personal Information they are extracting and collecting from all the voice and image data; they should explain why they collect this information, what they plan to do with it, how long they will retain it, and how they promise to limit secondary usage. They should explain that biometrics technology allows them to generate brand new PII out of members' snapshots and utterances. And they should acknowledge that by rendering data identifiable, they become accountable in many places under privacy and data protection laws for its safekeeping as PII. It's just not good enough to vaguely reserve their rights to "use personal information to help us develop, deliver, and improve our products, services, content, and advertising". They should treat their customers -- and all those innocents about whom they collect PII indirectly -- with proper respect, and stop pretending that 'service improvement' is what they're up to.
Siri along with face recognition herald a radical new type of privatised surveillance, and on a breathtaking scale. While Facebook stealthily "x-ray" photo albums without consent, Apple now has even more intimate access to our daily routines and personal habits. And they don’t even pay as much as a penny for our thoughts.
As cool as Siri may be, I myself will decline to use any natural language processing while the software runs in the cloud, and while the service providers refuse to restrain their use of my voice data. I'll wait for NLP to be done on my device with my data kept private.
And I'd happily pay cold hard cash for that kind of app, instead of having an infomopoly embed itself in my personal affairs.
Posted in Social Networking, Social Media, Privacy, Language, Biometrics
More evidence of the gap between tech and policy
After the scandal broke of how the iPhone app "Path" was accessing users' address books and transmitting them back to base, many in the developer community said they thought this was pretty common. The good folks over at Veracode decided to check, so they built another app that simply scans all code on your device for signs that the address book is being accessed. Believe it or not, the Apple operating system has a standard call, available to every app, called "ABAddressBookCopyArrayOfAllPeople".
Mark Kriegsman at Veracode blogged about their results :
Talking to the Veracode Research team about this iOS address book madness, the consensus was that none of this should come to a surprise to anyone who’s been following mobile development or security research for mobile platforms (emphasis added).
This is terrific work.
Despite the Veracode team's reaction, I'm sure most of the public — even the technologically informed public — would indeed be very surprised to know any old app can freely access their contact lists. If developers are not surprised, perhaps they look at privacy differently?
What probably will surprise many technologists is that under black letter privacy law in Australia, Europe and elsewhere, it would be an offence for the company deploying the app to access contact information on a phone without a good reason and/or user consent (let alone to do it without any notice at all as was the case with Path). As Kriegsman writes in the Veracode article, it’s hard to imagine why many of these apps have any cause to call ABAddressBookCopyArrayOfAllPeople.
Developers sometimes seem to think that if information is accessible to them, then it’s fair game for re-use or innocant "research". The classic example was the collection of wifi transmissions by Google Street View cars. Many said at the time that if data is in the “public domain” then it’s free to be collected and used. And they were very surprised indeed to learn that their presumption is simply wrong at law. Many privacy laws are generally blind to where Personally Identifiable Information is collected. If information is identifiable, and if you have no business collecting it, then you’re not allowed to. It’s black and white.
Posted in Social Networking, Privacy
Strippers are better off than Facebook users
Journalist Farhad Manjoo at Slate recently lampooned the privacy interests of Facebook users, quipping sarcastically that "the very idea of making Facebook a more private place borders on the oxymoronic, a bit like expecting modesty at a strip club". Funny.
A stripper might seem the archetype of promiscuity but she has a great deal of control over what's going on. There are strict limits to what she does and moreover, what others including the club are allowed to do to her. Strip club customers are banned from taking photos and exploiting the actors' exuberance, and only the most unscrupulous club would itself take advantage of the show for secondary purposes.
Facebook offers no such protection to their own members.
While people do need to be prudent on the Internet, the real privacy problem with Facebook is not the promiscuity of some of its members, but the blatant and boundless way that it pirates personal information. Regardless of the privacy settings, Facebook reserves all rights to do anything it likes with PI, behind the backs of even its most reserved users. That is the fundamental and persistent privacy breach. It's obscene.
Update 5 Dec 2011
Farhad Manjoo took me to task on Twitter and the Slate site [though his comments at Slate have since disappeared] saying I misunderstood the strip club analogy. He said what he really meant was propriety, not modesty: visitors to strip clubs shouldn't expect propriety and Facebook users shouldn't expect privacy. But I don't see how refining the metaphor makes his point any clearer or, to be frank, any less odious. I haven't been to a lot of strip clubs, but I think that their patrons know pretty much what to expect. Facebook on the other hand is deceptive (and has been officially determined to be so by the FTC). Strip clubs are overt; Facebook is tricky.
Manjoo blames the victims, saying that if people want privacy they shouldn't use Facebook at all. The headline on his article says users are as much to blame for Facebook's privacy woes as Mark Zuckerberg. This is just tacit acceptance of a Wild West, everyone-for-themselves morality that runs through so much of the Internet. We should debate the difference between what is and and what ought to be happening on the Internet, rather than accepting rampant piracy of PI and leaving hapless users to their own devices. The sorts of privacy intrusions that Facebook foists on its users are not intrinsic. Facebook doesn't have to construct biometric templates without the subjects' permission as soon as someone else tags them in photos, neither does it have to continuously run those biometric templates over third party photo data (probably uploaded for other reasons). Facebook could if it desired delete the biometric templates when users ask for tags to be removed, or at the very least alert users to what's going on in the backiground with photo tags. If photo tagging was just for the fun of the users, rather than commercial exploitation, Facebook would promise in its Privacy Policy not to put biometric templates to secondary purposes. But no, Facebook doesn't even mention these things in its Policy.
Some of us -- including both Manjoo and me -- have realised that everything Facebook does is calculated to extract commercial value from the Personal Information it collects and creates. But I don't belittle Facebook's users for falling for the trickery.
Posted in Social Networking, Social Media, Privacy, Internet, Culture
If Facebook were a government, there'd be riots
A repeated refrain of Facebook’s apologists is that privacy is dead. People are supposed to know that anything on the Internet is up for grabs. It’s digital apartheid: the new digital Brown Shirts say if you’re so precious about your privacy, just stay offline.
But socialising and privacy are hardly mutually exclusive; we don’t walk around in public with our names tattooed on our foreheads. Why can't we participate in these networks in a measured, controlled way without submitting to the operators' rampant X-Ray vision? And why can’t the apologists see how they’re sucked into generating the vast fortunes of Zuckerberg et al? It's nothing inevitable about trading off privacy for conviviality -- it's just more lucrative that way for the PI robber-barons.
The privacy dangers of Facebook are real and present and run so much deeper than the self-harm done by some peoples’ overly enthusiastic sharing. The privacy of millions in the mainstream of Facebook is imperilled. Facebook crowd-sources the identification and constant surveillance of its members. With facial recognition, Facebook is building up detailed pictures of what people do, when, where and with whom. I can be tagged without consent in a photo that was not taken by me, and not uploaded by me. The majority of photos in the cloud were not uploaded for this purpose. And look closely: When you remove a tag, Facebook does not remove the underlying biometric template, nor do they undertake to stop using the template that has been gifted to them by innocents who just think tagging their mates is kinda cool.
It’s not cool, it's insidious! And it’s rapaciously commercial like everything else they do. Facebook places no limitations whatsoever on the secondary uses it makes of the Personally Identifiable Information it's generating (which in itself is at odds with European and other privacy law, hence the law suits now underway in Germany).
You know, if a government was stealing into our photo albums, labelling people and profiling them, there would be riots.
Posted in Social Networking, Privacy, Biometrics
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is
Imagine a new secretarial agency that provides you with a Personal Assistant. They're a really excellent PA. They look after your diary, place calls, make bookings, plan your travel, send messages for you, take dictation. Like all good PAs, they get to know you, so they'll even help decide where to have dinner.
And you'll never guess: there's no charge!
But ... at the end of each day, the PA reports back to their agency, and provides a full transcript of all you've said, everyone you've been in touch with, everything you've done. The agency won't say what they plan to do with all this data, how long they'll keep it, nor who they'll share it with.
If you're still interested in this deal, here's the PA's name: Siri.
Seriously now ... Siri may be a classic example of the unfair bargain at the core of free social media. Natural language processing is a fabulous idea of course, and will improve the usability of smart phones many times over. But Siri is only "free" because Apple are harvesting personal information with the intent to profit from it. A cynic could even call it a Trojan Horse.
There wouldn't be anything wrong with this bargain if Apple were up-front about it. In their Privacy Policy they should detail what Personal Information they are collecting out of all the voice data; they should explain why they collect it, what they plan to do with it, how long they will retain it, and how they might limit secondary usage. It's not good enough to vaguely reserve their rights to "use personal information to help us develop, deliver, and improve our products, services, content, and advertising".
Apple's Privacy Policy today (dated 21 June 2010 [*]) in fact makes no mention of voice data at all, nor the import of contacts and other PI from the iPhone to help train its artificial intelligence algorithms.
I myself will decline to use Siri while the language processing is done in the cloud, and while Apple does not constrain its use of my voice data. I'll wait for NLP to be done on the device with the data kept private. And I'd happily pay for that app.
Update 28 Nov 2011
Apple updated their Privacy Policy in October, but curiously, the document still makes no mention of Siri, nor voice data in general. By rights (literally in Europe) Apple's Privacy Policy should detail amongst other things why it retains identifiable voice data, and what future use it plans to make of the data.
Posted in Social Networking, Social Media, Privacy, Cloud
Pseudonyms are for everyone!
Too many analyses of Google's and Facebook's Real Names policy take a narrow view of pseudonyms, conceding only that they may benefit for example "[dissidents] in Egypt, China, colonial America [and] whistle-blowers inside corporations and labour unions" (see Berin Szoka's "What’s in a Pseudo-name?").
There's evidently a belief that regular upstanding citzens have no need for pseudonyms, and a veiled suspicion that wanting one means you must have something to hide. Yet in truth, a great many ordinary Internet users have developed pseudonymous habits to protect themselves in the Wild West that is cyberspace today.
To frustrate the efforts of junk mailers and spammers, it's standard practice amongst many to use multiple e-mail addresses, or to fib about their location or their age when filling in forms. And where does the Real Names creed leave all the advice we've been giving our kids for years in social networking, to hide their age, their location and any identifying details?
It's important for everyone -- not just Mid-Eastern freedom fighters -- to have the autonomy to represent themselves how they like social settings.
What a twisted world is cyberspace these days! Think about it: Why the hell is the onus on users to defend their use of nicknames, when it ought to be the informopolies that justify imposing their self-serving rules on how we users refer to ourselves? We don't go around in public with our 'real names' tattooed on our foreheads! No "Social network" should be dictating how we socialise!
Posted in Privacy, Nymwars, Internet, Identity, Social Networking
Calling for a moratorium on SM facial recognition
The more I think about the use of facial recognition in social media sites, the more worried I get. I’m at the point of seeing a strong case for Privacy Commissioners to intervene in jurisdictions where they have the power. I'd like to see a moratorium. It should be of acute concern that photos originally uploaded for personal use are being rendered personally identifiable, and put to secondary purposes by social media companies, who are entirely silent in their Privacy Policies about what those purposes might be. The esssence of privacy is control, and with facial recognition, people are utterly impotent: you might be identified through FR by virtue of being snapped at a party or in a public place by someone you never even met.
It’s clear that sites like Facebook have facial recognition bots poring over their image libraries, because this is how they generate tag suggestions. Crucially, when a user asks for a tag to be removed, Facebook does not automatically remove the underlying template that joins the distilled biometric data to the user’s name. That requires a separate and obscure request not mentioned in their Privacy Policy.
Identifiable faces in photos are an incredible resource. Combined with image analysis for picking out features like placenames, buildings and logos, FR enables social media companies to work out countless new connections to add to their commercial lifeblood. They will be able to work out what we like – the brands we wear, cars we drive, the phones we use, airlines we fly, the places we frequent – without us having to expressly 'Like' anything.
Many users may be unaware of the rich metadata that goes with their photos and which then supercharges their linkages, including when a photo was taken, and in many cases where, thanks to GPS or geolocation in their camera phones. And then there is the metadata that the social media service adds, like the name of the user who uploaded the files. And from now on, who else is in it.
By encouraging its members to tag their friends, and then making tag suggestions which are validated by their subjects, Facebook is crowdsourcing the calibration of its FR algorithms. Even if users are wily enough to have the templates deleted, at the very least Facebook still benefits from the learning to improve its mathematics. All this volunteer testing and training by Facebook’s members is another example of the unfair bargain and false pretences under which Facebook harvests Personal Information.
Where is all this heading?
Automated facial recognition is a lot like granting social media companies x-ray vision into millions and millions of personal photo albums. As the FR bots do their work, it’s equivalent to magically tattooing names onto the foreheads of people in the photos. And then they can figure out where everyone was, at different points in time, who they were hanging with, and what they were doing. In effect, SM companies can cut out all those newly named faces, and reverse engineer global surveillance tapes.
Today those tapes will be patchy, but they will become exponentially more complete and detailed over time, as users innocently upload more and more imagery, and as the biometric efficacy improves.
Posted in Social Networking, Social Media, Privacy, Biometrics
Other thoughts on Real Names
I'm going to follow my own advice and not accept the premise of Google's and Facebook's Real Names policy that it somehow is good for quality. My main rebuttal of Real Names is that it's a commercial tactic and not a well grounded worthy social policy.
But here are a few other points I would make if I did want to argue the merits of anonymity - a quality and basic right I honestly thought was unimpeachable!
Nothing to hide? Puhlease!
Much of the case for Real Names riffs on the tired old 'nothing to hide' argument. This tough-love kind of view that respectable people should not be precious about privacy tends to be the preserve of middle class, middle aged white men who through accident of birth have never personally experienced persecution, or had grounds to fear it.
I wish more of the privileged captains of the Internet could imagine that expressing one's political or religious views (for example) brings personal risks to many of the dispossessed or disadvantaged in the world. And as Identity Woman points out, we're not just talking about resistance fighters in the Middle East but also women in 21st century America who are pilloried for challenging the sexist status quo!
Some have argued that people who fear for their own safety should take their networking offline. That's an awfully harsh perpetuation of the digital divide. I don't deny that there are other ways for evil states to track us down online, and that using pseudonyms is no guarantee of safety. The Internet is indeed a risky place for conducting resistance for those who have mortal fears of surveillance. But ask the people who recently rose up on the back of social media if the risks were worth it, and the answer will be yes. Now ask them if the balance changes under a Real Names policy. And who benefits?
Some of the Internet metaphors are so bad they’re not even wrong
Some continue to compare the Internet with a "public square" and suggest there should be no expectation of privacy. In response, I note first of all that the public-private dichotomy is a red herring. Information privacy law is about controlling the flow of Personally Identifiable Information. Most privacy law doesn't care whether PII has come from the public domain or not: corporations and governments are not allowed to exploit PII harvested without consent.
Let's remember the standard set piece of spy movies where agents retreat to busy squares to have their most secret conversations. One's everyday activities in "public" are actually protected in many ways by the nature of the traditional social medium. Our voices don't carry far, and we can see who we're talking to. Our disclosures are limited to the people in our vicinity, we can whisper or use body language to obfuscate our messages, there is no retention of our PII, and so on. These protections are shattered by information technologies.
If Google's and Facebook's call for the end of anonymity were to extend to public squares, we'd be talking about installing CCTVs, tatooing peoples' names on their foreheads, recording everyone's comings and goings, and providing those records to any old private company to make whatever commercial use they see fit.
Medical OSN apartheid
What about medical social networking, which is one of the next frontiers for patient centric care, especially of mental health. Are patients supposed to use their real names for "transparency" and "integrity"? Of course not, because studies show participation in healthcare in general depends on privacy, and many patients decline to seek treatment if they fear they will be exposed.
Now, Real Names advocates would no doubt seek to make medical OSN a special case, but that would imply an expectation that all healthcare discussions be taken off regular social circles. That's just not how real life socialising occurs.
Anonymity != criminality
There's a recurring angle that anonymity is somehow unlawful or unscrupulous. This attitude is based more on guesswork than criminology. If there were serious statistics on crime being aided and abetted by anonymity then we could debate this point, but there aren't. All we have are wild pronouncements like Eugene Kaspersky's call for an Internet Passport. It seems to me that a great deal of crime is enabled by having too much identity online. It's ludicrous that I should hand over so much Personal Information to establish my bona fides in silly little transactions, when we all know that data is being hoovered up and used behind our backs by identity thieves.
And the idea that OSNs have crime prevention at heart when they force us to use "real names" is a little disingenuous when their response to bullying, child pornography, paedophilia and so on has for so long been characterised by keeping themselves at a cool distance.
What’s real anyway?
What’s so real about "real names" anyway? It's not like Google or Facebook they can check them (in fact, when it suited their purposes, the OSNs previously disclaimed any ability to verify names).
But more's the point, given names are arbitrary. It's perfectly normal for people growing up to not "identify with" the names their parents picked for them (or indeed to not identity with their parents at all). We all put some distance between our adult selves and our childhoods. A given family name is no more real in any social sense than any other handle we choose for ourselves.
Posted in Social Media, Security, Privacy, Nymwars, Internet, Identity, e-health, Culture, Social Networking
Real names is real sly
In a favorite West Wing episode, the press secretary advises VP running mate Leo McGarry that he doesn't have to "accept the premise of the question". Let's remember this when engaging with the self-appointed social scientists and public policy makers at Google, Facebook et al who insist we use "real names" on the Internet.
It's terrific that Google’s Real Names policy has been soundly rebutted so widely, with earnest and worthy defences of the right to anonymity. I especially like the posts by Identity Woman, Dana Boyd, and Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic who compellingly relates how his own position shifted on the questions as he thought them through.
But at the same time I am disappointed so many defenders of freedom have been drawn into arguing the pros and cons of "transparency". The Namesake infographic (which dates from May, before the Real Names furore broke out, and was reprised by Mashable last week) dumbs down the debate by accepting it as a fight between extremes. Frustratingly, it grants legitimacy to Zuckerberg’s mad ideas that having two identities shows a lack of integrity.
As an aside, using the label "transparency" sub-textually reframes identity with a pro-Real Names bias, especially when juxtaposed against "anonymity" which sounds shady. Is it really fair to call it "transparency" when forcing people to reveal more than is necessary about themselves when they’re socialising?
This issue is really not about transparency at all. Let’s say loud and clear: the Real Names policies of Facebook and Google+ are self-serving commercial tactics intended to maximise the commercial value of their networked stores of Personal Information.
Obviously these informopolies add more value to their network data when they can index it with precision. The use of multiple personae disaggregates the metadata held by OSNs and reduces its value to advertisers and all other PI pirates. In fact reserving the right for individuals to disaggregate their PI is one of the cornerstones of information privacy. Thus in Australia we forbid businesses from reusing government-issued identifiers like Medicare numbers and driver license numbers.
We should not accept the premise that a Real Names policy serves any user-positive purpose, like "transparency", or that it forces better integrity in how people conduct themselves socially. The idea that bloggers are less than honest when not named is, ironically, utterly devoid of social nuance. At every turn, we instinctively compartmentalise our personae, revealing what matters when we interact in different circles – home, work, social, medical – and instinctively holding back what doesn't.
"Online Social Networks" should not seek to change the way we socialise.
We must not allow gurus like Zuckerberg get away with self-serving philosophies like 'we all have one true identity'. He really has no deep insights into the human condition. What he has is a mind-boggling personal fortune based entirely on knowledge about people he has harvested on largely false pretences, and which is diluted when those people are allowed to name themselves socially as they do in real life.
Posted in Privacy, Nymwars, Language, Internet, Identity, Culture, Social Networking
Diagnosing Google Health
The demise of Google Health might be a tactical retreat, but we need to understand what’s going on here and what it means for programs like Australia’s Patient-Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) and other commercial Personal EHRs like Microsoft’s HealthVault. On its face, it's sobering that the might and talent of Google hasn't been able to serve up a good solution.
There's no simple recipe for electronic health records; healthcare overall is an intractable system. Here are just a few things to think about, based on my time in e-health and working with medical devices:
1. Presentation of health information is hugely challenging. And healthcare providers and patients have totally different perspectives. Much more work needs to be done on the interfaces, and Google may feel that it’s better not to put off too many users at this stage with sub-optimal GUIs (especially if they need overhauling).
2. Clinical data on its own is near useless; it needs to go hand-in-glove with human expertise and also clinical applications (which feed data into the record, and extract data into decision support systems). The utility of PHRs used in isolation of healthcare experts still seems to be a wide open research field. What will patients be able to make of their own health data? Are PEHRs really only of interest to the "worried well"? Will it help or hinder when patients come to run their personal records through artifical intelligence services on the web?
3. Google is battered and bruised by a string of privacy controversies. While it bravely recovers its position and credibility after the Buzz and Street View wifi misadventures, it is exhibiting fresh caution; for instance they have put facial recognition on ice, with Eric Schmidt showing his soft side and calling it ‘too creepy’. [Maybe Google is going to tackle privacy in the same that Microsoft utterly revamped its security posture?] In any event, the last thing they need right now is a health related privacy stoush. At the end of the day, Google must make money out of e-health (and that’s entirely legitimate) but the business model may need a lot more careful work.
Points one and two apply to all PEHR/PCEHRs.
Designing an EHR dashboard that presents just the right information for the patient at hand, according to their current condition and the viewer’s particular interest, is a stupendous and fascinating task. Every clinical condition is different, and what a physician or patient really needs to see varies dramatically and deeply from one case to the next. It may require carefully characterising the everyman patient (actually, chronic patient, ambulatory out-patient, well person, parent ...) as well as the everyman healthcare professional (actually, nurse, GP, emergency intensivist, cardiologist ...).
We've all seen the literally fantastic videos of the hospital of the future, with physicians waltzing from bed to bed, bringing up multi-media charts on their tablet computers, and whizzing through test results, real time ECGs, decision support and so on. It looks great -- but aren’t they all just mock-ups?
STOP PRESS: The build-up to launch of Google+ recently might have also helped push Google Health back onto the drawing board. They may have sought to clear the decks for their privacy and governance teams!
Posted in e-health, Social Networking