Information sharing and integration are essential elements of today’s marketplace. Current information integration approaches are based on the assumption that all of the information in each database can be revealed to the other databases. This is a potential privacy concern in many applications, such as applications that involve medical information and national security. IBM Almaden Research Center’s Sovereign Information Integration (SII) technology allows companies to share and integrate data while complying with privacy policies and laws. The SSI technology employs an innovative double-encryption technique in which each party encrypts its own data and then sends it to the other party to encrypt again. Double-encrypted data can be compared without violating disclosure rules because nonmatching values are protected by the other party’s encryption and would be unreadable by either party. SII is the functional component of IBM’s Hippocratic Database, which ties into health care applications to let users indicate who should have access to certain patient data.

IBM has contracted with UAE CERT Telematics, the “leading technology and research organization of the United Arab Emirates” (according to their site), to develop and deploy over 100,000 automobile-monitoring systems in the next four years. The devices, according to this article at GeekCoffee, “would be installed in cars to provide a voice warning if the driver exceeds the local speed limit for wherever he may be driving. If the voice warning is ignored, the system would use a GSM/GPRS link to beam the car’s speed, identity and location to the police so that a ticket could be issued.”

There is no announcement yet as to whether these devices will be mandatory, or who will be selected for having to install the devices in their vehicles.

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We all have probably experienced using e-mail programs which provide auto-complete features. So if I were sending an email to Bob Smith and wasn’t paying enough attention there is a high possibility that I could send that email to Joe Smith. This is a problem since we not only reveal the other person’s email-address but now we can associate them to where they work as well. There are of course many ways we can prevent such problems from occuring. Some of them are mentioned in the article below.
E-mail poses privacy problems

Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Massachusettes is leading a coalition that will spend about $50 million that will allow for the creation of a medical records system in three communities. This will cover about 2,000 physicians, hospitals, pharmacies, and potentially nursing homes and community health centers. The goal is to reduce the number of medical errors by allowing physicians to log into a central database containing all of a patients medical records. This is an alternative to keeping patient records on paper in filing cabinets.

With any new advance in technology and information sharing where the data has such a high level of sensitivity attached to it, privacy concerns are abundant. First, I am skeptical of the system when the primary investors are insurance companies. It seems that the insurance companies have a vested interest in consolidating all of a patients records into one location. Personally, and as a researcher, this concerns me because I don’t think that insurance companies should have access to such a database. Although I don’t see where it is explicitly stated that they would have access to the database, it seems very possible that this is one of their goals. Additionally, I am concerned about so many people having such easy and transparent access to my data. The possibility of pharmacist or nurse looking up a neighbor or potential boyfriend in the database seems all too likely.

The adoption of such a system can undoubtedly bring forth advances in medical treatment and research, but at what cost to personal privacy? I urge everyone to consider the value of their medical history and the medical history of their friends, family, and community as an alternative to blindly accepting this new system.

Read more about the medical records database here.

Google has recently released a new desktop search tool that allows you to search your hard drive for information in the same way as you use Google to search information on the web. This is an exciting new technology and brings more convenience to end users. But, be careful about the privacy conerns with this new tool. The general public often get exicited about new technologies and hurry to try them out without realizing the implications. Educate yourself before you install the tool on your machine.

CNN has an article saying users could unwittingly let others see sensitive information. According to Richard Smith, a privacy-and-security consultant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “Google Desktop is a great organizer for finding information on your hard drive. But it’s really a spying program. If it’s installed on your computer and somebody else starts poking around, they can learn a lot about you.”

If you are sharing a computer with someone, you’d better be very careful about what information should be stored on your computer. For example, do you use an e-mail client that saves messages in local hard drive? Do you regularly visit some websites that you don’t want others to know? (Because your browser automatically saves the visited pages for a while in the cache, you’d better clear the browsing history and location bar history every time after use.) Do you store other sensitive information on the computer such as banking account, credit card numbers, usename/passwords? With google’s new tool, it would be very easy for other users of the computer to find this kind of information on the hard drive. Read more about privacy and desktop search.

Imagine an implantable chip under your skin that contains all your personal information. The FDA recently approved marketing these chips for a Florida company. This chip would provide access to individual medical records not only to medical professionals but also to those who have the technology that can read embedded information. For more information read more at :
Identity Badge Worn Under Skin Approved for Use in Health Care

I’ve been fascinated by scandal over the past week regarding a story on 60 Minutes in which Dan Rather showed some supposedly newly-discovered documents that had been discovered that were damaging to Bush’s service record while he served in the National Guard. Over the past few days there has been a growing body of evidence to suggest that the documents used in the 60 Minutes story were forged. While it hasn’t been proved 100% to anyone’s satisfaction, enough questions have been raised about the authenticity of these documents that CBS is widely being criticized for basing their news story on these documents.

There are aspects of this emerging story that are relevant to all of us who care about privacy and technology, regardless of how we feel about Dan Rather and CBS and regardless of how we feel about the upcoming elections.

It’s amazing to see how quickly the facts surrounding these documents were investigated and how quickly serious questions about these documents were raised by web loggers and other interested people on the Internet. For a good summary of the chronology of events immediately following the story see