Comments on: I love Google. But I love my privacy more

By: Jame Lusane

Jame Lusane — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:22:59 +0000

I would like to show my gratitude for your kind-heartedness for folks that need help on that issue. Your very own commitment to getting the solution across had become especially effective and have surely allowed girls just like me to reach their dreams. Your valuable useful information means this much to me and even further to my office workers. Thank you; from all of us.

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By: TheRoon

TheRoon — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:24:35 +0000

Jason - interesting points…but again you tag in conspiracy versus true reality! Do you really think that your current medical records; printed in some folder somewhere in a hospital, or scattered around disk drives in some medical data center…is safe and sound? (Especially considering the state our public health institutes…including the private hospitals) The objective of Google Health is not to take from a user what’s out there today…unsafely recorded and utilized… but to actually give control over various aspects of your own health record! This is about you gaining more control and thus more security and flexibility. With some lunch money I would bet I could head out to the medical institutes where you’ve lived and with some incentives get copies (if not the originals) of your entire health record! Nevermind the big brother conspiracy here… having control over your medical records ensures you can self diagnose and be assisted in a better way when in a medical crisis. This is the real world Jason!

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By: Jason Elk

Jason Elk — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:23:29 +0000

@Dee exactly, precisely, absolutely!

@Win You’ll have a hard time finding Jason Elk on Facebook or Myspace or any other social space. I only use my full name for professional/business instances (like TechLeader) and for the rest I use a mix of fantastical fictional noms de plume.

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By: Win

Win — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:31:31 +0000

Jason, you are already publishing your personal stuff on-line. Just from reading this article I know certain behavioral traits from you. I know your first name and last name…the rest I can pretty much find out by searching the wev, reading a cv hear and there and the rest facebook or myspace will help me with. My point: Sooner or later everything will be on-line Google will index it, the display it for you in nice categories for easy browsing

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By: Dee Chetty

Dee Chetty — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 07:44:04 +0000

Agreeing with Jason!

The underlying problem is not the fact that Google did this, it is the fact that the public love Google enough to just love the idea purely based on th fact that its Google!

Google CLEARLY knows this, leverages this and rolls out the most brilliant plan to take over the world without even blinking in a stare-down competition!

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By: Paddy II

Paddy II — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:29:28 +0000

*nods sagely* That’s an excellent point.

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By: Jason Elk

Jason Elk — Thu, 29 May 2008 23:41:11 +0000

Half of me thinks you’re right, Paddy. Maybe all this flapping is unnecessary. But the other half of me really thinks that the scariest part of this all is not even the idea of users sharing health information without giving it a second thought, but the fact that Google came up with the idea in the first place and then still went ahead with building the service, launching the service and staring at the public straight-faced, ready to collect our private bits and pieces. Did no one at Google raise their hand to say ‘um, aren’t we going a bit far now?’. And if someone did, and they were ignored, what kind of villain is Google becoming? It’s like a James Bond movie and Google’s sitting stroking their persian.

Imagine if any company other than Google launched a happy dandy come-share-your-medical-history-and-lab-results service online. It would surely be hounded to hades by Techcrunch, bloggers and even mainstream media. Instead, everyone’s carried on as though Google just launched a tweak to their algorithms. Google has license to do anything, ask us anything, demand anything. This is what’s so scary.

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By: Paddy II

Paddy II — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:17:51 +0000

Jason, this is definitely a pertinent issue, but I suspect you’re being a little alarmist. Seeing Google Health definitely made my eyebrows jump through my cranium - but I simply won’t use it.

I ask: why would Google (or anyone, for that matter) be interested in an insignificant blip on the interwebz like me? I’m not a hacker, I’m nothing particularly important, and I’ve got no plans to become either of those. So I shrug and use Gmail, because it’s damn cool. (But I am careful about what I give to Marc Zuckerberg by putting stuff on Facebook. Employers can see that shit.)

Then again, perhaps you’re not being overly paranoid, and I’m just being naive… I am open to being corrected.

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By: Jason Elk

Jason Elk — Tue, 27 May 2008 17:06:40 +0000

You’re right about email. It’s something I hate to admit that I rely on - purely from a portable storage point of view. I’m not mad about flash drives (mainly because they can be lost so easily) so I rely on gmail for remote copies of presentations, urls and other info that I need on the run. But yes, this shouldn’t be left to Gmail’s servers and technical staff to sift through at their leisure. I should insist on an Exchange server setup at the office - but on our eternal To Do list, this is such a low priority. But I might just nudge it up slightly now that it’s front of mind again.

I think we should end the Google ideas here and now. They might come trawling and actually sprout some of these. If that ever happens, I’m buying myself a Cape Union Mart tent and going to live in a cave

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By: Auric Silverwing

Auric Silverwing — Fri, 23 May 2008 10:23:20 +0000

And herein lies the problem with the personalised web. The moment services become personal, that information has profit potential. No real surprise there - so why should things like Google Health come as a surprise?

I was quite surprised - in all honesty - to learn that the Mozilla Foundation was considering implementing Phorm-like technology into Firefox. Effectively, Mozilla would keep track of your browsing habits, and somewhere down the line, use that information to serve ads back to you (Phorm minus the ISP).

I draw the line at email. Besides - anything on a Google server sits on a backbone that may well become inaccessible, if American Telcos get their way. I don’t want all my collaborative work disappearing behind a stonewall with “Sorry, your country is not permitted access to this network”-type error messages thrown at me. And I feel much safer if my data is on my harddrive.

What about Google Brainwave? An implant that tracks your thoughts, submits the data to Google Trends, and uses it to refine the filters used by AdWords to serve the most relevant ads humanly possible? Plus, with 14TB of free storage, you’ll never forget another thought again!

// Silverwing

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