3 ms·

Health privacy, while kind of important Ina vacuum, is maybe the most overrated issue of our day. Not only do I not care if my health data is out there but I w

Health privacy, while kind of important Ina vacuum, is maybe the most overrated issue of our day. Not only do I not care if my health data is out there but I wish it were. Right now healthcare is barely using data, it's absurd. Let's focus on making good diagnostic AI preventative medicine to let people live forever.

Avicebron 6y ago
And when you can't get insurance coverage because said AI says you have a disqualifying condition?
- darkwizard42 6y ago
  Then solve the real underlying problem...insurance... NOT the segmentation of valuable health information that could help advance medical discoveries (with that data being handled properly)
  - jlokier 6y ago
    We haven't solved that underlying problem yet, and the problem isn't insurance. It's that many kinds of actor have motivations to misuse individual, detailed health data in ways that can be seriously harmful to the individual. I don't know if there's a way to solve that problem, even in principle. It seems like an intrinsic conflict of interest thing. Until that's solved, that will remain a major and rational reason why people care about health data privacy. There's no point saying "ignore health data privacy and fix the real problem" until people can fix the real problem. Which as I've said, might not be possible even in principle. Meanwhile, the thing people can do for themselve is focus on privacy of their healthcare records and demanding that be maintained. Institutions and companies can incrementally develop improvements to aggregating data that don't simply discard that privacy, like differential privacy for smart data aggregation, and zero-knowledge systems like the Google/Apple coronavirus alert system. Perhaps eventually we'll and up with a way to aggregate health data in ways that are more helpful for diagnostics and population-level understanding of diseases, while safeguarding individuals from harmful consequences.
vharuck 6y ago
Health is a deeply personal thing to many people. It's not surprising why people want to keep it secret, and I don't feel right asking them to give that up because there might be other benefits. Health privacy is something the world won't suffer much for having. And health care analytics don't need any more data. There's already a ton. It's held by hospital systems, insurers, and governments. But the data sucks for analytics because it's chosen, coded, and siloed for payments.
- gerash 6y ago
  I believe lots of regulation plays a part in making these health datasets not interoperable and hard to migrate to some common schema and database
gerash 6y ago
100 times this. I know privacy is a good thing but the amount of FUD over health data privacy is unreasonable. I feel this hysteric reaction to aggregating health related metrics is in fact an impediment to running good scientific experiments. The current sample sizes are always small and results inconclusive wasting thousands of man hours and government grants funded by our tax money Only to gain what? Apple and Google not storing my step counts on their servers because otherwise in future they'll go rogue and show me cheeseburger ads when I'm getting fat? Give me break

Avicebron 6y ago

And when you can't get insurance coverage because said AI says you have a disqualifying condition?

darkwizard42 6y ago
Then solve the real underlying problem...insurance... NOT the segmentation of valuable health information that could help advance medical discoveries (with that data being handled properly)
- jlokier 6y ago
  We haven't solved that underlying problem yet, and the problem isn't insurance. It's that many kinds of actor have motivations to misuse individual, detailed health data in ways that can be seriously harmful to the individual. I don't know if there's a way to solve that problem, even in principle. It seems like an intrinsic conflict of interest thing. Until that's solved, that will remain a major and rational reason why people care about health data privacy. There's no point saying "ignore health data privacy and fix the real problem" until people can fix the real problem. Which as I've said, might not be possible even in principle. Meanwhile, the thing people can do for themselve is focus on privacy of their healthcare records and demanding that be maintained. Institutions and companies can incrementally develop improvements to aggregating data that don't simply discard that privacy, like differential privacy for smart data aggregation, and zero-knowledge systems like the Google/Apple coronavirus alert system. Perhaps eventually we'll and up with a way to aggregate health data in ways that are more helpful for diagnostics and population-level understanding of diseases, while safeguarding individuals from harmful consequences.

vharuck 6y ago

Health is a deeply personal thing to many people. It's not surprising why people want to keep it secret, and I don't feel right asking them to give that up because there might be other benefits. Health privacy is something the world won't suffer much for having. And health care analytics don't need any more data. There's already a ton. It's held by hospital systems, insurers, and governments. But the data sucks for analytics because it's chosen, coded, and siloed for payments.

gerash 6y ago
I believe lots of regulation plays a part in making these health datasets not interoperable and hard to migrate to some common schema and database

gerash 6y ago

100 times this. I know privacy is a good thing but the amount of FUD over health data privacy is unreasonable. I feel this hysteric reaction to aggregating health related metrics is in fact an impediment to running good scientific experiments. The current sample sizes are always small and results inconclusive wasting thousands of man hours and government grants funded by our tax money Only to gain what? Apple and Google not storing my step counts on their servers because otherwise in future they'll go rogue and show me cheeseburger ads when I'm getting fat? Give me break