Recently in Google Category

Ok, so yesterday I posted the witness list for today's Net Neutrality/Broadband hearing. I could have woken up at 5am to beat the line standers and get a seat with the lobbyists who pay people to stand in line for them in the halls of the Rayburn building, but I didn't. I could be listening on the Audio Webcast. I tuned in for about 10 minutes, and haven't been impressed yet. I've got other projects, other things to work on, so I'm listening but my attention has not been caught. Why? Have you ever turned on your favorite TV show expecting a new episode and instead getting a rerun, or worse yet, a 3 hour extended version of American Idol? You know what you'll be seeing and hearing. No surprises, nothing to discuss with your friends. Just the same, this hearing, despite a few new faces, was a rerun in a series over the past year or so, including a few at the FCC. 

...in reporting on the total scariness of Google Health. 

In an article in The New England Journal of Medicine, two leading researchers warn that the entry of big companies like Microsoft and Google into the field of personal health records could drastically alter the practice of clinical research and raise new challenges to the privacy of patient records.

The authors, Dr. Kenneth D. Mandl and Dr. Isaac S. Kohane, are longtime proponents of the benefits of electronic patient records to improve care and help individuals make smarter health decisions.

Did the good doctors read my story from over a month ago called Google Health is Frightening?People's medical records contain all kinds of things that are nobody's business but their own. Any doctor or hospital that would outsource their record-keeping, which is one of the most important things that a doctor can do for a patient (keep a good chart), is abdicating their responsibility and calls into question whether they value convenience over ethics. The doctor-patient relationship, including medical records, has long been considered sacrosanct. For a company like Google to actually want to offer this as a service says more about their arrogance than the system itself does about their capacity to innovate, and for any doctor or hospital to buy or use it would, to me, be a violation of trust.

There are those in Washington and around the country (Paul Krugman is one) who believe that electronic, portable charts are the key to universal health care. Krugman regular cites the Veterans Administration as an example, since they use some electronic records. The big difference is a) they keep it in-house, and b) they are a single organization. If I wanted to send my VA records to a private doctor, I would have to jump through way more hoops than just telling Google it's OK...and I should have to. Hillary Clinton regularly throws out "e-charts" as the solution to all our problems, and more centralization of records was a big part of her failed 1993 "Hillarycare" plan that she is so loathe to discuss now.

This should not be easy.

Google should be commended for trying to simplify health care record keeping, but this is an arena where they should keep their mitts off. If they want to sell a "black box" turnkey solution for internal record keeping, go for it, but I will still insist on paper. Host my records for me? Go away.

How many times do I have to repeat myself?

Google, MS, Dell and the rest of the White Spaces Coalition (WSC) want to keep white spaces unlicensed.  They want the unused spectrum to be available for use to anyone, the way the internet is.

Sprint and T-Mobile want white spaces to opened up as well.  But under licenses.  Specifically, they want to license the spectrum and use it for backhauling. CTIA  has joined Sprint  and T-Mo (the number 3 and 4 wireless carriers in the country) in supporting the use of white spaces under licenses.  CTIA pointed out that they're worried about interference with devices on the licensed portion of the spectrum, but FCC-mandated tests are being run on potential white space devices to make sure that doesn't happen.

I'm a little torn or the issue.  On the one hand, it would be great to be able to buy a white space device and access the internet for surfing or Skype-ing.  On the other hand Verizon and AT&T (who surprising aren't voicing opposition to the White Space Coalition) spent billions of dollars for 700MHz licenses.  Is it really fair for the WSC to roll out devices that will access that same spectrum without paying for a license?  Although the 700MHz spectrum could be used for voice calls Verizon has already stated that they're going to use theirs to roll out LTE, their next generation wireless broadband.  I don't see them as being happy with white spaces being used for the same thing.

I (as I've said close to 258,798,663,325,458 times) am not a lawyer or anything, but here's my common sense take on white spaces.

If you think (or know) that I'm way off base, please leave comments.


More on CTIA vs Unlicensed White Spaces at FireceWireless.

Remember when Google bought DoubleClick and the FTC reluctantly agreed to it? Well, now come the layoffs, after a bunch of employees signed non-compete agreements.

8. Covenant Regarding Competition. I agree that for a period of one (1) year after my employment with the Company terminates, I shall not (a) engage in any employment, business or activity that is competitive with the Company's businesses; or (b) solicit business from, do business with or render services to, in any capacity, directly or indirectly, any entity that is or was a Company client or customer within the last twelve months of my employment with the Company, for a purpose or in a manner that is in any way competitive with the Company's business. If, during or after my employment with the Company, I seek work elsewhere, I agree to provide a copy of this Agreement to any person or entities seeking to hire me before accepting employment with or engagement by any such person or entity.

9. Solicitation of Employees. I agree that for a period of twelve (12) months immediately following the
termination of my relationship with the Company for any reason, whether with or without cause, I shall not either directly or indirectly solicit, induce, recruit or encourage any of the Company's employees to leave their employment, or take away such employees, or attempt to solicit, induce, recruit, encourage or take away employees of the Company, either for myself or for any other person or entity.

Now, notwithstanding that non-competes are unenforceable in many states (I'm not sure about CA), if the employer acted in bad faith, I can imagine that if this included enough employees it could turn into a class-action lawsuit. Why?

As a result of the recent California court decision in D'Sa v. Playhut, this approach by employers has been called into serious question.  Prior California cases have held that inclusion of an unenforceable noncompete provision could be the basis of a violation of California Business and Professions Code Section 16600 (which 

voids any contract provisions that restrain an individual from engaging in his or her lawful profession, trade or business) and could possibly lead to penalties under the Business and Professions Code Section 17200 (which prohibits unfair trade practices). In D'Sa, the California Court of Appeal for the Second Appellate District took these rulings a step further by holding that such a provision may subject an employer to liability.

Despite the "don't be evil" motto, I suspect Google could have a hard time defending themselves in court against this one, as California's court system has a very dim view of Non-Competes.

In an ideal world, they could only hold your data for six months, according to recommendations of a European Commission advisory board, as noted by the BBC.

Search engines should delete personal data held about their users within six months, a European Commission advisory body on data protection has said.

The recommendation is likely to be accepted by the European Commission and could lead to a clash with search giants like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Google and Yahoo anonymise user data after 18 months, while MSN does the same after 13 months.

The body said search companies were not clear enough on data protection.

Google said its privacy policy "strikes the right balance" between privacy, security and innovation.

Do they mean innovation in search, or innovation in selling ads? Is that why you index your users' email to provide them keyword-based ads, Mr. Fleischer? You mean security, not privacy. Privacy would mean that your systems don't scan every piece of mail to serve up contextual ads that have to do with the messages they're viewing. Privacy would mean that Google probably couldn't monetize nearly as much as it has. Privacy is the opposite of revenue for an operation like Google.Can we please stop using cookies as the be-all and end-all of privacy? Cookies are benign. You can set a short lifetime, but collect incredible loads of data with it. You can also collect cookies from other sites to see what your users are doing when they aren't on your pages. 

Much ado is being made of this Times Online article which talks about the CIA buying Google's search technology and using Wikis to sort and share information on potential suspects.

Google has been recruited by US intelligence agencies to help them better process and share information they gather about suspects.

Agencies such as the National Security Agency have bought servers on which Google-supplied search technology is used to process information gathered by networks of spies around the world.

Google is also providing the search features for a Wikipedia-style site, called Intellipedia, on which agents post information about their targets that can be accessed and appended by colleagues, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The contracts are just a number that have been entered into by Google's 'federal government sales team', that aims to expand the company's reach beyond its core consumer and enterprise operations.

Why can't people just be glad that we're still buying American? This is not a big deal. Chill out and save your energy for making tinfoil hats. Please.

Here's a little of what Vint Cerf had to say at Google's Washington office in an ongoing talk about Net Nutrality and the Future of the Internet.

 

The Internet is intended to be an open system, allowing anyone who wanted acceess to get to it. It is important that it stay that wat because the economic success has allowed new experiments "without permission."

 

That openness has made it an interesting environment, despite potential for abuse.

Here are 3 ways that Cerf thinks we can fight back against abuse on and of the internet

 

A) Technical - doesn't always work.
B) Detect and Respond - difficult to trace source, but next natural step.
C) Education - like gravity...en mass very powerful.

 

Because of the international nature of the Internet, Cerf believes that rules and regulations need to be agreed upon at an international level, perhaps even by way of treaty.

 

More updates from the Future of the Internet event as they become available.

Only 24 hours after Mark Zuckerberg's pretty sound recovery from the disastrous Sara Lacy "keynote" at SXSW, in which he took questions but still refused to give details on how much access to Facebook Platform he would give developers, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch reports that Yahoo! may join Google's OpenSocial initiative:

Yahoo is in late stage discussions with Google to join their OpenSocial platform, says a NYTimes story from earlier this evening. Multiple sources at both Yahoo and Google confirm to us that discussions are happening, but won't say when an announcement might be made.

This would be a major win for Google, which has already enticed MySpace and other big partners to a platform that launched less than five months ago. OpenSocial is a defense by Google and it's partners against the runaway success of Facebook Platform, itself less than a year old. Both platforms allow third parties to create applications that will run on OpenSocial partner sites, or Facebook, as the case may be.

Wow. If Zuckerberg is shy about revealing plans for Platform, he'd better get over it quick before developers go with the tried-and-true instead of the white-and-blue (ouch, that was awful, but it's 1am so leave me alone). 

 In the interests of fairness, after hearing the presentation of the IFPI "Best Practices" whitepaper this morning, I reached out to one of the authors, Rena Shapiro, of Google. I mentioned that I had written about Yahoo!'s political advertising program yesterday, and magically, I received a series of calls from an incredibly nice Googler in New York asking me to meet with someone at Google's DC office about their political ad initiative. In the interests of equal time, I of course accepted, walked a few blocks from the conference hotel, and arrived here:

.

The Hill prints some truly idiotic ideas from DC people sometimes. Every single proponent of "health care reform" agrees that better patient record-keeping is a good idea. It's a centerpiece of every presidential candidate's proposal, as if digital health records are some kind of magic way to cut costs. As expected, everyone wants to get in on this next federally mandated gravy train. I've already written about Google Health in these pages, and Microsoft has introduced their HealthVault software, but did you know that Steve Case, the man who built AOL (and watched it become worthless) has his own great idea for keeping your most intimate information in a computer?

The vice president of the American College of Physicians , Michael Barr, agreed that the government still has a role to play even as these companies are positioning themselves in the market for electronic medical records.

Uniform standards for sharing medical information still need to be established because healthcare providers are responsible for maintaining complete "medical legal records" for their patients, Barr said. "They're working on one end of it and not the other," he said of Google, Microsoft and the other technology companies.

While useful to patients, "these [personal health records] that Microsoft and Google are providing will not replace the medical charts ... for documentation purposes," Barr added.

So, these things are pretty much useless except from a data mining point of view. Your doctor is going to have to keep his own records, so why would you give them to Google or Microsoft, or anyone, for that matter? Keep in mind that these third-party companies are not covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Once you give them your records, you've given them your records. Their rights are defined by terms of service. Of course, they'll tell you that they have no reason to hurt your privacy, that there is a "market force" behind keeping your data secret. 

The Health Information Trust Alliance, a private cooperative led by representatives of healthcare and technology companies, released a survey of health IT executives on Monday showing widespread concern about the absence of a uniform, HIPAA-compliant information security framework that medical providers and companies can employ.