personal data

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2019 Forecast: Amara's Law: Health Data, Gene Editing, and Artificial Intelligence

I have two predictions for 2019. One is that at the end of 2019 our healthcare system will still look a lot like it looks now. Oh, sure, we'll see some cool new technologies, some innovative start-ups, some surprising corporate pairings, some moves by Big Tech, and some promising clinical findings. But our healthcare system moves slowly, and many in it have strongly vested interests in the status quo. The second prediction is that, more than ever, Amara's Law still prevails. In case you don't know this "law," it is attributed to Roy Amara, who was President of the Institute for the Future, among other things, and goes like this...

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5 Civic Projects Aim To Make Data Useful

J. Nathan Matias | PBS.org | July 22, 2013

How can we use data to improve our lives, our communities, and the world at large? At the recent Microsoft Design Expo, students from eight universities showcased design projects along the theme of “making data useful.” Read More »

6 remarkable features of the new United Nations open source initiative

The United Nations wants to make technology, software, and intellectual property available to everyone, including developing countries. Open source and free software are great tools to achieve this goal since open source is all about empowering people and global collaboration while protecting the personal data and privacy of users. So, the United Nations and the open source community share the same values. This new open source strategy and policy is developed by the United Nations Technology Innovation Labs (UNTIL). Last month, we had our first in-person meeting in Helsinki in the UNTIL offices. I find this initiative remarkable for several reasons:

Data Protection Responses To PRISM "A Smokescreen"

Simon Phipps | Computerworld | June 17, 2013

An online privacy expert has denounced European responses to US Internet surveillance and called for legal immunity in Europe for those that report its effects. [...] Read More »

FTC Commissioner: Let Big Data Flourish, But 'Reclaim' Privacy

Anthony Brino | Government Health IT | June 27, 2013

The issue of privacy in the era of big data has come to the fore recently in the wake of National Security Agency leaks — as it well should, according to Julie Brill, a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. Read More »

HealthCare.gov Security Gaps Identified In Contractor Documents

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | December 17, 2013

A congressional watchdog investigating the troubled launch of the Obama administration’s online health insurance marketplace HealthCare.gov released a handful of contractors’ statements on Tuesday showing they were concerned about security vulnerabilities before and soon after the site launched. Read More »

Information Wants To Be Complex

Heather Leson | Ushahidi | June 29, 2013

Questions lead to answers that lead to more questions. Tactical Tech Info Activism Camp has a number of tracks: Documentation, Investigation, Curation, and Beautiful Troublemakers. I joined the “microscopes are us” evidence team aka Documentation. [...] Read More »

Officials Aren’t Counting The Growing Cost Of Online Obamacare Fraud

Aliya Sternstain | Nextgov | October 24, 2013

Don't ask the federal government how much money citizens are losing to Obamacare Internet scams. Tracking the dollars stolen through fake exchanges and other sites that prey on insurance applicants apparently is not under the administration's jurisdiction. Read More »

ONC at OSCON 2012: What Could the Future Bring?

Damon Davis | Health IT Buzz | August 22, 2012

The open source software (OSS) community is full of creative software coders developing amazing computer applications collaboratively. Recently I witnessed the power of their collaborative innovation first hand at the Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, OR. This was the conference’s 12th year…but my first experience. Read More »

Say Goodbye To Privacy: How Nest Might Transform Google

Tero Kuittinen | BGR | January 14, 2014

It’s no wonder some people are freaking out over Google’s $3.2 billion Nest Labs acquisition: it’s another step towards a future when Google has enough access to lives of high-income consumers to gain psychological insights that no company has ever possessed. Nest’s Learning Thermostat can track movements and activity of people in their homes, an ability no doubt improving by leaps and bounds. [...] Read More »

The ‘privacy by design’ approach for mobile apps: why it is not enough

The mobile apps installed on our smartphones are one of the biggest threats to our digital privacy. They are capable of collecting vast amounts of personal data, often highly sensitive. The consent model on which privacy laws are based doesn’t work. App users remain concerned about privacy, as a recent survey shows, but they still aren’t very good at protecting it. They may lack the technical know-how or the time to review privacy terms, or they may lack the willpower to resist the lure of trending apps and personalized in-app offers...

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VA Networks Besieged By Foreign Attackers, IG Says

Nicole Blake Johnson | Federal Times | June 4, 2013

Foreign attackers have repeatedly penetrated Veterans Affairs Department networks for at least the past three years, potentially gaining access to millions of unencrypted veterans records and other sensitive databases, according to House lawmakers and VA inspector general auditors. Read More »

Who Controls Your Smartphone? And How to Leverage Open Source to Prevent it from Spying on You

There are many things about today’s world that warrant us asking that question. Do you or the mobile vendor control your smartphones? If you are a consumer, small or medium business (SMB) -- the answer is the vendor...What if you are a large enterprise or a government agency? The answer is still the vendor...How can the user regain control? Not all vendors have locked devices and walled gardens. Google’s line of Pixel hardware, for example, is a mid-market solution whose bootloader allows locking and re-locking. Pixels support two versions of Android. Google Mobile Services (GMS), where free services are tied to data monetization and a UX like Apple and Samsung devices. Secondly, Pixels can run Android Open-Source Project (AOSP) code that shares the same strengths as the GMS build, but the customer controls the code base and updates. There are several companies that are selling AOSP operating system builds for Pixel and other unlockable/lockable mobile phones and tablets...

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Why Should We Even Care If The Government Is Collecting Our Data?

Rebecca J. Rosen | The Atlantic | June 11, 2013

Kafka, not Orwell, can help us understand the problems of digitized mass surveillance, argues legal scholar Daniel J. Solove. Read More »