Notes on Privacy
History seems on fast-forward with the advent of the internet taking us from oral traditions through written ones to streaming visual media shaping our lives faster than we can remember what happened yesterday. I used to take photos to commemorate special places, people, and events; now I find my phone glued to my hand anytime I need anything I’d rather not think too hard to discover for myself. As with all conveniences, there are trade-offs: autocorrect has whittled my spelling accuracy - sometimes I don’t even bother to write whole sentences; over time has impacted my vocabulary and communication effectiveness in other mediums. I’ve uncomfortably called it My External Hard-Drive, not too far from the truth.
Beyond vanity or an aesthetic philosophy, I learned in my late teens that in order to survive, I must chase joy at all costs. Along with this fanaticism to document every-little-thing (PICS or it DIDN’T HAPPEN!) yet remembering about the same (perhaps less?), I feel a growing unease. Without intent to deceive (save some rose-colored glasses), there are large swaths of life I’ve needed to recover, and am coming up short. Meanwhile this amorphous footprint of digital media has so far outpaced my ability manage, I wonder whether privacy is archaic as legislation that may also fail to address artificial intelligence (AI), once that too outruns me.
I’ll date myself a little and say: as a Freshman in college I remember when Facebook was brand new - a very small community restricted to those holding university email accounts. After opening up to the WWW things really took off, and we started throwing personal information out the door like old shoes. Not long before, I was calling my dad from my first iPhone in absolute wonder, extolling its virtues: Internet! Email! Address Book! Held in the palm of my hand!! He was amused; countered as the first holder of a pocket calculator in his college - its size? Approximating the dimensions of a Steno Pad - to be clipped to the exterior of one’s pocket.
But here I am years later, digging through old notebooks and highlight reels coming up empty-handed. My trauma was dealt in small, steady doses, hidden even from myself. Because at the end of the day, I wanted to be happy, married, and everything else people expected from me. That’s how you make it work, for better or worse.
Meanwhile our private health information (PHI) may be the last frontier remaining sacred for data privacy. HIPAA as the original Obamacare, instituted around the time dial-up was putting a computer in every middle-class home, is most easily recognized with keeping your PHI protected from employers and anyone else who does not have an explicit, authorized use for its purpose.
Why is this important? With rapid deployment of AI, the rising importance of electronic health records (EHR) in making accurate diagnoses with effective treatments, and the potential for more centralized healthcare in America, we could be converging on 1984 faster than you can say George Orwell.
Entrepreneurs will see opportunities here, but the big dogs with endless pockets have political pull, and those are the ones to watch. Stop chasing conspiracies, start reading the fine print. And VOTE.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
-George Santayana
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