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Maintaining privacy is on many people's minds these days, but sometimes that's the last thing they do. Allegations last week that two British tabloids, The Sun and The News of the World, had employed high-technology snoops to listen in on the mobile phone messages of public figures highlighted fears of what can happen when digital data fall into dubious hands. The reports came only days after another privacy debacle, this one self-inflicted. Photos and family information about Sir John Sawers, soon to be Britain's chief spy, appeared in another newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, after his wife posted them on Facebook. While attitudes toward privacy can appear paradoxical, the seeming contradiction is really about something else: control. When people bare their bodies on Facebook or their souls in the digital confessional of Google's search engine, they feel as if they are in charge. Not so, when the private embarrassments come to light unexpectedly.

Bring up the subject of digitizing medical records and you're likely to get a paradox of a discussion. Everyone thinks it will help save money and improve health care, and everyone has grave reservations. Get ready to hear more as a massive economic stimulus bill works its way through Congress, which includes IT health care spending measures. Although lawmakers are close to pulling the trigger. ensuring the privacy of patients' electronic health records (EHR) remains a top concern. "I very firmly believe that the Achilles heel of health IT is privacy," said Sen. Jim Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat who chaired a hearing this morning examining the appropriate safeguards government should insist on before it doles out billions of dollars to help providers computerize patients' records. Champions of health IT argue that EHRs and interoperable systems to integrate data among providers would drive down healthcare costs while greatly reducing medical errors. Just 17 percent of physicians currently have even basic EHRs. The Center for Disease Control has estimated that as many as 98,000 preventable deaths occur in U.S. hospitals each year, many of which could presumably been avoided with more accessible patient data. "If 100,000 Americans were being killed by anything else, we'd be at war," Whitehouse said.