Group items tagged

"Drug and insurance companies will from later this year be able to buy information on patients - including mental health conditions and diseases such as cancer, as well as smoking and drinking habits - once a single English database of medical data has been created."

"Now, by my estimates, the half-life of a career is about 10 years. I expect that it will decrease, within a decade, to five years. Advancing technologies will cause so much disruption to almost every industry that entire professions will disappear. And then, in about 15-20 years from now, we will be facing a jobless future, in which most jobs are done by machines and the cost of basic necessities such as food, energy and health care is negligible - just as the costs of cellphone communications and information are today. "

New York healthcare provider, California's higher education system and the U.S. Department of Energy have become the latest targets of data bandits.

"The bill will now allow police to access all web browsing records in specific crime investigations, beyond the illegal websites and communications services specified in the original draft bill. It will extend the use of state remote computer hacking from the security services to the police in cases involving a "threat to life" or missing persons. This can include cases involving "damage to somebody's mental health", but will be restricted to use by the National Crime Agency and a small number of major police forces."

"FROM THE BOING BOING SHOP   FOLLOW US Twitter / Facebook / RSS Singhealth, a Singaporean public health service, suffered the worst breach in Singaporean history, losing control of 1.5 million peoples' data; included in the breach was prescription data on 160,000 people, including Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong."

"Customers will be able to use a "Smile to Pay" facial recognition system at the tech-heavy, health-focused concept store, part of a drive by Yum China Holdings Inc to lure a younger generation of consumers. "

"Based on data from over 17,000 teenagers, the study "casts doubt on the widely accepted notion that spending time online, gaming or watching TV, especially before bedtime, can damage young people's mental health.""

""Urban legends are projections of society's anxieties, hopes, fears, and worries," says Blank. "In today's society we have societal anxiety about what our kids are doing on the internet, the amount of control and information that's available to kids nowadays, societal fears about cyberbullying and how people are managing their mental health online, especially for kids." "The Momo story reflects that anxiety of what is it our kids are doing online," continued Blank."

""Personalised, preventative healthcare is mission critical to the future-fit healthcare service we want to build," said Hancock last week. "We must harness the latest technology and techniques to move away from the one-size-fits-all approach of the past."" - DO YOU AGREE?

"As the number of coronavirus cases in South Korea exceeded 6,000 this week, there was a rise, too, in complaints about information overload in the form of emergency virus text alerts that have included embarrassing revelations about infected people's private lives."

"But an analysis of the app's code found that it does more than decide in real time whether someone poses a contagion risk; it also shares information with the police, setting "a template for new forms of automated social control that could persist long after the epidemic subsides"."

"Dubbed TraceTogether, the app is able to identify people who have been in close proximity - within 2m for at least 30 minutes - to coronavirus patients using wireless Bluetooth technology, said its developers, the Government Technology Agency (GovTech) and the Ministry of Health (MOH), on Friday (March 20)."

"The company, Unacast, went live with its Social Distancing Scoreboard Tuesday. The dashboard, billed as a public health utility, includes a county-by-county breakdown of people's movement patterns. It assigns each county a grade, which Unacast based (at least in part) on how much people are traveling. "

"A draft government memo explaining how the NHS contact-tracing app could stem the spread of the coronavirus said ministers might be given the ability to order "de-anonymisation" to identify people from their smartphones, the Guardian can reveal. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced on Sunday that the UK planned to introduce an app that would enable people who developed Covid-19 symptoms to "anonymously" alert other users to whom they had been in close proximity. "All data will be handled according to the highest ethical and security standards, and would only be used for NHS care and research," he said."

"Privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance in this effort, and we look forward to building this functionality in consultation with interested stakeholders. We will openly publish information about our work for others to analyze. All of us at Apple and Google believe there has never been a more important moment to work together to solve one of the world's most pressing problems. Through close cooperation and collaboration with developers, governments and public health providers, we hope to harness the power of technology to help countries around the world slow the spread of COVID-19 and accelerate the return of everyday life."

"Since Moonshot was founded, there has been a radical shift in the perception of technology's role when it comes to extremist terrorism. "Five years ago, there were still people inside the government who thought tech was for the kids," Frenett says. "There was a sense that it was almost amusing that terrorists were on the internet. You don't get that any more. Likewise, five years ago there were some great organisations doing great work on the violent far-right, but again it was almost seen as niche. That's no longer the case.""

""What is emerging is that [Aadhaar] is being used to create a panopticon, a centralized database that's linked to every aspect of our lives - finances, travel, birth, deaths, marriage, education, employment, health, etc.," Reetika Khera, an Indian economist and social scientist, told VICE News. Security concerns have plagued the system for years, but in recent weeks criticism has grown deafeningly loud. Earlier this month, as part of the Supreme Court case on privacy, an activist's freedom of information request suggested that foreign firms were being given "full access" to the classified data - including fingerprints and iris scans."

"In the last year, Facebook adjusted some of the most fundamental rules about what gets posted on its platform, halting algorithmic recommendations of political groups, banning lies about vaccines and removing a number of high-profile figures for spreading misinformation and hate - including Donald Trump. But researchers say the social media platform is not enforcing those policies as effectively when it comes to misinformation in Spanish - a blind spot that may prove deadly as health lies spread through the most vulnerable populations during the global vaccine effort."

"And lest you think we are dealing in long-term abstractions- this devastation has tangible, externalized cost; a recent study out of the University of New Mexico estimated that in 2018 every $1 of Bitcoin value was responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in the US, costs that are borne by those who will, for the most part, never see any return from cryptocurrency mining whatsoever."