Google was recently handed the confidential medical data of 1.6 million patients treated at a London hospital (Royal Free), for use by Deep Mind, in breach of the Data Protection Act: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/03/google-de...
This phenomenon goes way deeper than people not caring about privacy. It underlies everything from the bystander effect [1], to the Nuremberg defence [2], and everything in between.
People just don’t want to organize, generally speaking. The people who do usually end up as part of the elite. The rest are just focused on their individual lives.
They used to far more. The eighties and nineties disassembled many of the places and means to organising. Disassembly of civic community, unions, restrictions on demos, decline of social societies such as Lions Clubs and others. Now we're all individuals, organising alone.
https://splinternews.com/organized-labor-is-in-a-life-and-de...
"For an entire century, the corporate class in America has dreamed of destroying organized labor, which eats into their ability to amass endless profits. They’ve chipped away at unions for 40 years. Now, it is no exaggeration to say that they are two steps away from total victory."
...
"This is a very scary time. Take it seriously."
If all of us want to be completely different from all the others we don't have many things in common anymore and there is no reason to unionize or fight for the same goals.
Every little protest or group can then be shut down or silenced just by stating how they are just representing a really tiny minority of all the people.
I know this could spark some debate but I think it is a point where Marx was right all along. It's about the things we have in common that help us to collaborate to tackle our problems and we are the strongest when working together.
I've gotten cynical as well as I feel like constantly talking to the bus full of the people who are interested in their freedom which just doesn't arrive somewhere.
and the fiasco that started that conjecture was `Kitty Genovese` murder, which was repeatedly reported as well. the police just didnt care enough to actually dispatch someone at that day. or are you insinuating that random people from the street should interfere if there is an armed perpetrator running around knifing people?
or `Raymond Zack`, ...how do you expect random people to actually do something? he wanted to kill himself. if he wanted to get out of the water, he couldve done it within the 60 minutes he was just standing in the water. and after he collapsed someone even went in. despite the fact that its incredibly dangerous to try to help someone who is actively trying to kill himself. if that doesnt disprove the conjecture by itself, idk what could.
each and every example is just showing that there are tragedies which the police arent able to handle. that doesn't mean that the bystander effect is actually real.
As an aside, it is not just Deepmind/Google, all the players are trying to get all the EHR data around the world. The NHS is particularly attractive due to the volume of historical data of course. Its no secret IBM Watson is working with NHS Wales although I don't know what data sharing agreement is in place.
That's fine so long as it goes nowhere else - it's perfectly reasonable for the NHS to have AI models to do their thing, just as the Met Office and others do. Remember years ago Google had a Search Appliance? A rack mount server to put in your business. The NHS should be doing the same with IBM, Deepmind and other models - figure a way to licence and use the technology without sharing any data back whatsoever.
Data for training, helping IBM et al building better models should be 120 years old or more - guaranteed not to contain anyone alive. The restrictions on medical privacy are there for very good reasons, though I tend to the view they don't go nearly far enough for the modern world.
Only way is to completly anonymize data, which is way harder than it sounds.
What's complicated about it? So long as it's not attached to a name, social security number, or some other personally identifiable marker - how would anybody know it's you? You're just an anonymous collection of data points.
I understand whatever fingerprint they use for your data is almost definitely completely unique, but that doesn't mean it can be associated with the corresponding person unless you allow that to happen. I mean I get that it's obviously not trivial from a security perspective, but what's the main blockade here?
What's complicated is Google and others are extreme data hoarders. Google can get the anonymous health records and run a fuzzy match of model records against Home, URL and gmail records. Find high confidence correlations against multiple conditions across the years, where the search preceded new medical entries for those conditions within x time. Now they're in this data set for condition y and oh lookie, they searched condition y related topics multiple times last year. Anonymous record i1389541 is Alice Smith of Wimbledon, set her adwords flags to condition y snake oil, sell record to UK life insurance consortium. [repeat]. No personal data was released, but you're fully de-anonymised.
With enough data and history it becomes absurdly easy to decloak the majority with high or complete confidence.
Welcome to the future.
The alternative is find a way to prevent those uniquely identifying correlations at any point in the future, using techniques we haven't yet thought of. Which is probably impossible without diverging the anonymous medical record some considerable distance from reality. Faked enough to remain anonymous might not be helpful for research into a condition or its diagnosis...
That said, that's completely different from what I implied in my original comment, so point taken.
If I'm exaggerating it's from trying to make up a credible example off the cuff. When the Snowden revelations were coming thick and fast I remember several examples coming up around search stream and meta-data. Mostly terrifying as either could reveal in far more detail than actual content of messages what you appeared to be thinking in the moment. Tie that with medical and health data and any pretence of privacy falls.
The key insight[ß] was that privacy researchers are essentially rediscovering the information-theoretical deanonymisation attacks that have been known to advanced marketing departments for the past two decades.
0: Evgenios Kornaropoulos, UC Berkeley: "Attacks on Encrypted Databases Beyond the Uniform Query Distribution"
ß: anyone present at the last talk should recognise the term used.
On the other hand personally I wish my medical history could be scanned and screened for some preventable terminal diseases by some AI (with some form of consent though preferably).
That being said, I would also respect someone who said that it is nice to see Google aid in medical research and see some of the best minds of ML allowed to access high quality data to develop these solutions.
This was not a Google ad network integrating medical records in order to target the sale of medicin... It was a medical research project.
I'm going to get fired up once someone gets hurt. I know someone is going to call slippery slope, but until someone can prove harm (beyond the broken trust and principle of data sharing), I'm going to save my pitch fork for bigger problems.
How many females in a (county|country|postcode} born on 5 March 1942 are there with a kidney problem? Particularly in the UK where a postcode, even the locality selector (the first half, e.g. M50, NW11) is more precise than many US zipcodes that can cover many square miles. A full UK postcode narrows it down to within the street - a dozen or two houses usually. What if there is associated medical data like medications or chronic conditions - diabetes, arthritis etc?
To make it suitable for study a) keep it within the NHS or relevant health authority - perhaps allowing an airgapped DeepMind server to come in process locally and afterwards get wiped or shredded, or b) remove all personal data including gender, dates, associated medical info of any type - i.e. render it almost useless for study.
Oh and c) imprison all the management who agreed to share this data without patient consent and in breach of DPA, and require Google to remove all trace under audit.
"proper anonymisation" is a set of goalposts that keep moving - it's like password length or bcrypt work factor. What's enough today won't be enough with CPU, or in a year or three, or perhaps a suitably fancy AI from the world's largest data hog. Proper anonymisation likely requires all associated data - any dates, blood group, medications, chronic conditions etc removing, hence mention of making it so bland as to be almost useless for study.
Google will do what they have always done, ignore privacy, train models on full data, apologize later ans delete data when no longer needed.
You dont know this, but people at Google are Gangsters and bullies They dont give a hoot about laws in Europe, about privacy or any of that. They think they are right and that everyone else is wrong.
See the guy above who said this is for the collective good, even though everyone who knows even a little bit stats and machine learning knows full well that these sort of sensitive data will lead to unimaginable grief for outlier patients. In particular, because Google cares about money, and not the collective good!
Everyone should be outraged, it is the only rational reponse.
Was apparently to get the team that could get this sweeping level of data: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-deepmind-sets-up-heal...
The Hark team (https://www.harkapp.co.uk) brought huge influence in the NHS and at the national level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ara_Darzi,_Baron_Darzi_of_Denh...
Because I let users know I'm not going to spam them with that shit at those that enacted that law can go to hell for every site I visit having it. It's a good thing but really annoying. There has to be a better, more interesting way.
The 'Cookie Law' is the 2011 ePrivacy Directive. it will be replaced by the ePrivacy Regulation (eventually). https://www.cookielaw.org/the-cookie-law/
The modern privacy law is GDPR, which came in in 2018. Pre-dating that were the somewhat country-specific interpretations of the 1995 Data Protection Directive.
Your browser controls your cookies - use that, clear them, do whatever you want.