There is already a circle around an individual’s health data. This represents an expansion of that circle, and I think by focusing on the technology before it b

There is already a circle around an individual’s health data. This represents an expansion of that circle, and I think by focusing on the technology before it becomes too deeply integrated into “the way things are” it can happen quickly, in the way that congress passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act in 1995. Expanding the circle to protect more PII in general is going to be a longer fight because we’ve already let economic power and consumer behaviour develop into a strong status quo. For instance, if strong regulations came in to limit the creation of profiles for targeted advertising and that resulted in Google withdrawing free email accounts from the market, it might not have a lot of popular support.