Larry Page has announced that Americans should stop worrying over keeping their medical records private. He claims that the only legitimate reason not to disclose the information is fear of being denied medical insurance. Unfortunately, Page lives in a world unlike 99% of Americans who have everything to fear if their private medical information was released.

“At least in my case I feel I should have done it sooner and I’m not sure that answer isn’t true for most people, so I ask why are people so focused on keeping your medical history private?”

Page doesn’t have to worry about his employer firing him if they find out about medical ailments that he may have. For most Americans, once an employer finds out that you’re going to cost them a lot of money or your illness/ailment might one day prevent you from performing your job, you will be let go. They won’t give you a reason. They don’t have to. But, if they know your medical condition, they will find a reason.

The Google CEO guessed most people are guarded about their medical history because of insurance reasons.

“You’re very worried that you’re going to be denied insurance. That makes no sense, so maybe we should change the rules around insurance so that they have to insure people,” he said to a round of applause.

The ACA is already doing this. You’re put into a higher risk pool and, starting next year, everyone must have health insurance and no one can be denied. Maybe Page, and the entire room that applauded, need to pay more attention to the news.

Page spoke of a frustration with laws that were preventing Google from doing some experiments. Health records was just one such area where legal restrictions ultimately led to the closure of its Google Health service.

“We haven’t built mechanisms to allow experimentation. There are many things, exciting things that you could do that you just can’t do because they are illegal or they are not allowed by regulation. And that makes sense, we don’t want our world to change too fast,” he said.

Many people don’t want to discuss their medical history. It really is no one else’s business and they aren’t going to help Page and Google to open that up to scrutiny because he has an agenda and wants to conduct experiments.

Page’s condition is minor when it comes to revealing an illness. Not many people would want the world to know that they only have one testicle, have had an abortion, are infertile, have diabetes, herpes, AIDS, a family history of heart disease, Chron’s disease, mental illness, or any other host of conditions that the general public does not need to know. Many of these conditions could put a person’s employment at risk as well as making it difficult to find adequate housing.

Page admits that he doesn’t fully understand the situation. So, instead of getting up in front of the media and blurting out whatever comes to mind, he should have researched his position ahead of time. His ignorance of the situation is clear, yet he doesn’t care because he doesn’t have to worry about his own private medical situation. HIPAA may not be perfect, but it’s the best thing Americans have to protect their medical privacy. It shouldn’t be so easy to obtain because someone has an agenda and thinks everyone should think as he does.

Picture Source.

Networked Tracking Scope

Heads Up Display

“Think of it like a smart rifle. You have a smart car; you got a smartphone; well, now we have a smart rifle,” says company President Jason Schauble. He says the TrackingPoint system was built for hunters and target shooters, especially a younger generation that embraces social media.

Except no one is using their smart car or smart car to kill people intentionally. The rifle is a weapon that kills people. That’s it’s purpose. We shouldn’t be making killing people easier.

Schauble says because the company sells directly — instead of going through gun dealers — it knows who its customers are and will vet them. And he says there’s a key feature that prevents anyone other than the registered owner from utilizing the gun’s capabilities.

Many people can pass being “vetted” and still use the weapon against other people. Just because a person passes your tests today doesn’t mean they will pass them a year from now.

“It has a password protection on the scope. When a user stores it, he can password protect the scope that takes the advanced functionality out. So the gun will still operate as a firearm itself, but you cannot do the tag/track/exact, the long range, the technology-driven precision-guided firearm piece without entering that pass code,” he says.

While that’s a nice feature, if a person purchases the rifle with the intention to kill other people, password protections are a moot point.

You can read more here and watch the broadcast of the episode 19 May 2013 on CBS.

Some parents have serious concerns, that student grades, test scores, even health records will be vulnerable to cyber attack.

“I’m very concerned about our children’s privacy,” Stickland said. “In my eyes, it’s an invasion of our children’s privacy and parents aren’t involved in the conversation and they’re not allowed to consent.”

The school district says that the current system is a waste of time.

“With inBloom, what that does is it allows teachers to get access to data in a much more efficient way than they do now,” Mortimer said. “They have to log into so many different systems. Eight, 9, 10 systems or more sometimes on a daily basis just to get access to the data that they need.”

Also of concern is the fact that students, and their parents, have no option to opt out of sharing student information with third parties.

Another concern is that inBloom will share student data with third party companies, which may not have the same digital security technology.

Jeffco points out the pilot program is in full compliance with FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, although those laws were recently relaxed to allow collection and sharing of student data without parental consent.

Have you seen the Capitol Hill drone pilot? You’ve read concerns about Seattle Police using drones for surveillance but a resident of the Miller Park area around 19th and Thomas tells CHS she is concerned about a fellow citizen employing a drone near her home:

This afternoon, a stranger set an aerial drone into flight over my yard and beside my house near Miller Playfield.  I initially mistook its noisy buzzing for a weed-whacker on this warm spring day.  After several minutes, I looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away.  My husband went to talk to the man on the sidewalk outside our home who was operating the drone with a remote control, to ask him to not fly his drone near our home.  The man insisted that it is legal for him to fly an aerial drone over our yard and adjacent to our windows.  He noted that the drone has a camera, which transmits images he viewed through a set of glasses.  He purported to be doing “research”.  We are extremely concerned, as he could very easily be a criminal who plans to break into our house or a peeping-tom.

The woman tells us she called police but they decided not to show up when the man left. She wonders if anybody else has encountered this Capitol Hill drone pilot.

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The American Civil Liberties Union has obtained documents revealing that the FBI and IRS may be reading emails and other electronic communications of U.S. citizens without obtaining a warrant. This comes just as reports have emerged that the Obama administration is considering approving an overhaul of government surveillance of the Internet. The New York Times reported the new rules would make it easier to wiretap users of web services such as instant messaging. “The FBI wants to be able to intercept every kind of possible communication,” says attorney Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “The FBI basically wants to require all of these companies to rewrite their code in order to enable more government surveillance. … And in order to accomplish that, they would make the whole Internet less secure.”

As part of a sociology of criminology class project where students were to dress up as criminals, one student wore a ski mask and carried a cardboard cutout of a gun, school spokesman Peter Anning said.

The student was taking pictures before the class began when another student panicked and called Santa Clara police at 2:47 p.m. to report a person with a gun, he said.