The myth of selective sharing, or some thoughts on the future of digital health and activity data.

1. Digital Health Futures:
Empowerment or coercion
Or,
The Myth of Selective Sharing
Marc Smith

2. XBOX ONE, TELESCREEN ZERO
Better than Orwell

3. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any
sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low
whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he
remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque
commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of
course no way of knowing whether you were being watched
at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the
Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was
guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched
everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your
wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from
habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every
sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness,
every movement scrutinized.

4. http://video.wired.com/watch/new-xbox-kinect-exclusive-wired-video-398878

5. ‘Smith!’ screamed the shrewish voice from the
telescreen.
‘6079 Smith W.! Yes, YOU! Bend lower, please!
You can do better than that. You’re not trying.
Lower, please! THAT’S better, comrade. Now
stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.

6. http://video.wired.com/watch/new-xbox-kinect-exclusive-wired-video-398878

7. To keep your face expressionless was not
difficult, and even your breathing could be
controlled, with an effort: but you could not
control the beating of your heart, and the
telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it
up.

8. http://video.wired.com/watch/new-xbox-kinect-exclusive-wired-video-398878

9. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts
wander when you were in any public place or
within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing
could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious
look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—
anything that carried with it the suggestion of
abnormality, of having something to hide. In any
case, to wear an improper expression on your face
(to look incredulous when a victory was announced,
for example) was itself a punishable offence. There
was even a word for it in Newspeak: FACECRIME, it
was called.

11. COMPUTER SECURITY IS AN OXYMORON
All health data should be assumed world readable

12. Information that is
not public
and has not yet been
destroyed
is just waiting to
change to
either
state.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/baileyblack/1545504824/

13. http://www.fitbit.com/home
https://jawbone.com/up

14. ACLU Pizza
http://www.aclu.org/pizza/

15. Risky behavior will be priced in
real time, 3rd glass of wine
tonight? Click here for a $20
extension for alcohol related
injury or illness.
http://www.connectedaction.net/2009/02
/18/the-future-of-helath-insurance-
mobile-medical-sensors-and-dynamic-
pricing/

16. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c1473442-a6f4-11de-bd14-00144feabdc0.html
Novartis chip to help ensure bitter pills are
swallowed
By Andrew Jack in London
Published: September 21 2009 23:06 | Last
updated: September 21 2009 23:06
technology that inserts a tiny microchip into
each pill swallowed and sends a reminder to
patients by text message if they fail to follow
their doctors’ prescriptions.
the system – which broadcasts from the “chip
in the pill” to a receiver on the shoulder – on
20 patients using Diovan, a drug to lower
blood pressure, had boosted “compliance”
with prescriptions from 30 per cent to 80 per
cent after six months.

17. Prediction: a mobile App will be more
medically effective than many drugs
If only because it will make you take the drug
properly

18. Google Flu Tracker

19. Result: lives that are more publicly
displayed than ever before.
• Add potential improvements in audio and
facial recognition and a new world of
continuous observation and publication
emerges.
• Some benefits, like those displayed by the
Google Flu tracking system, illustrate the
potential for insight from aggregated sensor
data.
• More exploitative applications are also likely.

20. Information wants to be copied

21. The Myth of Selective Sharing
Bits exist along a gradient from private to public.
But in practice
they only move
in one direction.
http://www.connectedaction.net/2011/07/25/the-myth-of-selective-sharing-why-all-bits-will-eventually-be-public-or-be-destroyed/

22. Secure links
between
people and
content…

23. …are as strong
as the weakest link

25. Cryptography weakens over time
Eventually, private bits,
even when encrypted,
become public because
the march of computing
power makes their
encryption increasingly
trivial to break.

26. No one expects
privacy to be
perfect in the
physical world.

27. Patterns of connection
may uniquely identify
De-anonymizing Social Networks
Arvind Narayanan & Vitaly Shmatikov
http://33bits.org/2009/03/19/de-anonymizing-social-networks/
Abstract:
Operators of online social networks are increasingly sharing potentially sensitive information
about users and their relationships with advertisers, application developers, and data-mining
researchers. Privacy is typically protected by anonymization, i.e., removing names, addresses, etc.
We present a framework for analyzing privacy and anonymity in social networks and develop a
new re-identification algorithm targeting anonymized social-network graphs. To demonstrate its
effectiveness on real-world networks, we show that a third of the users who can be verified to
have accounts on both Twitter, a popular microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-
sharing site, can be re-identified in the anonymous Twitter graph with only a 12% error rate. Our
de-anonymization algorithm is based purely on the network topology, does not require creation
of a large number of dummy “sybil” nodes, is robust to noise and all existing defenses, and works
even when the overlap between the target network and the adversary’s auxiliary information is
small.

30. http://www.flickr.com/photos/docsmith/4502313017

31. Information that is
not public
and has not yet been
destroyed
is just waiting to
change to
either
state.

32. Conclusions
 Selling “selective exposure” as a feature has dangerous failure conditions.
 Assume public by default.
 It takes a long time for mitigating technologies to catch up.
 Insurance companies turn out to be the heros in the history of technical risk.

33. Digital Health Futures:
Empowerment or coercion
Or,
The Myth of Selective Sharing
Marc Smith