YWAM Information Technology - your medical information stored at google - Comments

Nervous

Donovan — Tue, 27 May 2008 07:33:48 +0100

I am no where near the paranoid type, but when people use Google for almost everything, it does make me wonder... you use google mail, you use their collaboration tools for sharing calendars and contacts, you store documents, etc. and now your medical records. I wouldn't had all of my personal data over to Microsoft and I don't see Google as any different. By the stuff I already use... Google reader, some mail, etc. they already have enough stuff on me as it is!

the complexity of trust

crashsystems — Wed, 21 May 2008 05:22:09 +0100

When you talk about trusting a company (as opposed to a person), things get rather complicated. In this case, I'd trust Google from a technological standpoint to hold onto such information, provided I used a good password and didn't have a secret question thats answer was my mom's maiden name. Their business model is such that it is in their vested interest to maintain my trust.

The one area where I would know better than to trust them with this data is if it was something that I didn't want to get into the hands of my national government. Any company holding your data is going to comply with a gov issued order to hand over info, but in this case my medical information could be obtained via other means (and I have no medical records I want to hide from the gov). Same thing goes with email. The vast majority of email that I send/receive with my Gmail account is the sort of thing that isn't harmful to ether myself or others. There is the occasional email though, especially when emailing certain people in other countries, where I know I couldn't trust Google. In these cases I encrypt these conversations, and I carefully guard that encryption key myself.

your medical information stored at google

neo — Wed, 21 May 2008 02:52:09 +0100

Google has just released its service to store your medical information on their servers. So, you can have access to that information at any time from anywhere, well if you have internet access that is. You can give your medical records to doctors and clinics without dragging around tons of paper work and x-rays, etc. Sounds nice, so far.
Of course Google would not be Google if they don't use that information in some way. E.g. they will make statistics of some kind. Anonymous, of course.

So, do you personally trust them with that or is Google now the officially enemy for collecting too much personal information?

What do you think?