Google to Offer Online Personal Health Records 242
hhavensteincw writes "Less than two weeks after Microsoft announced plans to offer personal health records, Google announced today that it plans to offer online personal health records to help patients tote and store their own x-rays and other health data. Google made the announcement Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco."
Re:Translation (Score:5, Interesting)
The operative word here is "let". It's not like they are indexing publicly available records and placing them out there in one easy to locate spot for everyone to see. People choose to use GMail, have their conversations logged in GTalk, catalog their daily schedules and sync their work calendaring to GCalendar, and search for ways to kill their lovers in the most secretive ways on Vanilla Google.
If someone wants to offer up their personal privacy to a company, so be it. While I'm not telling you to stop your personal crusade to educate the retarded general public, I'm just telling you that it's better than what other companies are probably doing behind closed doors. I guarantee that Google, even in its infinitely undetermined future evil ways will be less so than 99% of the rest of the companies out there.
I really hope that I don't get proven wrong
Re:Translation (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:MS Pulled an apple (Score:1, Interesting)
"Good" vs "evil" has nothing to do with it. Google getting into this first is fact.
Do you know what you're paying? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Google's business is targeted ads (Score:2, Interesting)
The issue is when that data is retained after processing and potentially lost/given/used inappropriately.
Intresting point, whose records are they (Score:3, Interesting)
If I take a picture of you, it is a picture of YOU, but MY picture. The english language really fails here because you could also say it is your picture as in you are in the picture without actually owning said picture.
Medical records are of a person, but are created by another person reflecting that persons opinions about that other person. Who owns a record, the person who wrote it or who it is about? You can say that you want your records in your hands but you are quit right that this would remove from the doctor all the information he has collected that he could need in a lawsuit. It would be like saying, that speedcamera picture belongs to me, okay, now I got it, go ahead and prove I speeded. HAHA!
I think we barking up the wrong tree here, medical records being kept is useful, useful for the patient because a doctor can see your history. Useful for the doctor since it saves time, useful for society since you can use it to tell what is happening to the population.
What we need to do is put extremely harsh punishements in place against abuse. Sell medical data, serious jail time for EVERYONE involved, the person who stole it, who transported it, who bought it and who used it.
Because abuse is possible of something doesn't mean you get rid of something, you get rid of the abuser.
Offcourse this is hard to believe in when even the most basic save guards against abuse of our freedoms are being trampled on the world over.
Re:The writing's on the wall (Score:2, Interesting)
It was called Altavista and didn't work as bad as you make it to be.
The only fault I could point about it were a longer name than google and a less simplistic home page.
interoperability (Score:2, Interesting)