When our confidential information is hacked, many of us shudder at the disclosures: financial data, sensitive correspondence and passwords that we might not want strangers, employers, even loved ones to know.
We tell ourselves we value that privacy and wish to protect it at all costs.
Fact is, though, we willingly, consciously and satisfyingly share enormous digital data every day.
Our relationship to privacy is influenced by personal convenience. Depending, we want walls in places or a ladder to climb over them elsewhere.
As I write this column online, I doubt anything is tracking my keystrokes – maybe I’d worry about that, but maybe not. I don’t want my email or texts revealed.
But my web browser is open with a few tabs, and my smartphone is next to me with a few live apps as I write. I would prefer not to have to plug my address and credit card information into every online transaction, so in a few outlets I leave that content inside someone else’s vault.
If I thought much about it – and I don’t – I’d realize I’m an open vein to the collection of information about my behaviour and preferences.
While I’m annoyed when I book a trip online and can’t shake rival advertising offers for days on my screens, it is an acceptable trade-off for the convenience of e-commerce. Indeed, I am delighted or dejected as my FitBit reminds me daily how close or not I’ve come to my 10,000 daily steps or optimal sleep. I want my FitBit to collect information – to tell me about me. Given it’s an inelegant timepiece, why else have it?
I cite this ambivalence to note a prevalent theme at The Data Effect, an illuminating conference I recently attended (and, full disclosure, MCed) featuring nearly 200 people who work with health data.
The provincial minister for advanced education, Andrew Wilkinson, made a claim at the conference I think would engender a thoughtful and timely debate for wider society.
He argued that people want information about their health shared more widely. He thinks the general public is well ahead of reticent policy-makers and hack-reporting-happy media on this score.
Wilkinson and others in medicine, business and academia sounded a common chord about the curiously cautious information-sharing that, were it addressed, would save lives and dollars. There is a large sweet spot, he and others argued throughout the day, that would not violate our privacy while, well, sharing our private information.
Sure, we would not want our employer or prospective insurer to know our health history without our consent, but we definitely want our doctor, urgent care centre, laboratory and pharmacy to serve us seamlessly and contextually – especially in an age of the walk-in clinic, where we often don’t have a constant medical connection in the system.
Instead, we haul around or a courier brings around a giant paper trail that takes hours or days to sketchily amass our health profiles in an era that could aggregate empirical data in a matter of a nanosecond.
Naturally, the effort to reach a balance in this disclosure/protection seesaw turns political quickly, given how this health information is a form of power in need of judicious application. The implications of efficient delivery are not only physical and psychological but also financial. In an era of tight-fisted governance unlikely to raise taxes sufficiently to meet many more of the costs of health care, an investment in health-care hardware to facilitate information flow fast becomes an economic imperative.
While there is a political risk to advocating pathways, there are also clear concerns about surveillance, dirty data, liability and accessibility, among other matters.
All carry price tags and influence policy.
What is clear, though, is that we are fast approaching a day of reckoning bound to build new paths. Providing there is an acceptable protection of sensitivity, we will like it.
Kirk LaPointe is Business in Vancouver’s vice-president of audience and business development.
