Measuring the Internet: the Data Challenge

Lehr, W., "Measuring the Internet: The Data Challenge", OECD Digital Economy Papers, No. 194, OECD Publishing, April 13, 2012.

From the abstract: “This working paper reviews a number of the challenges and opportunities confronting analysts interested in measuring the Internet and its economic and social impacts. It identifies several additional challenges to the measurement issue, in addition to all of the normal problems one expects when measuring information and communication technologies (ICTs). These challenges are related to: the rapidly changing nature of the Internet, the need for more granular data in order to understand the complex nature of the Internet, and the phenomenon of big data and the resulting ability to measure almost anything.” Read more

A Rose-Colored View May Come Standard

Bilton, Nick. "A Rose-Colored View May Come Standard." The New York Times, April 4, 2012.

From the article: "Google on Wednesday offered a look at a previously secret project to develop Internet-connected glasses, staking out a lead position in a futuristic and fast-growing area known as wearable computing.

Google’s glasses are still in the prototype stage.

The glasses, which are still in a prototype stage, would place a small see-through display screen above a person’s eye that can show maps and other data. The wearer could use voice commands to, say, pull up directions or send a message to a friend.

…. A video released by Google, shot from the perspective of a glasses-wearer, showed how the glasses might work. A man wanders the streets of Manhattan, communicating with friends, seeing maps and other information, and snapping pictures. At the end he plays the ukulele for a friend over a video link." Read more

Consumer Reports Survey Confirms That We're Worried About Online Privacy

Quirk, Mary Beth. "Consumer Reports Survey Confirms That We're Worried About Online Privacy." The Consumerist, April 3, 2012.

From the article: "What with credit card companies being hacked, apps on smartphones that have you sign your life away before using them and new policies from social networks and search engines, there are a lot of reasons for consumers to be uncomfortable about the state of online privacy. That's exactly what a national survey by our smarter elder siblings at Consumer Reports found — most of us are pretty darned concerned.

According to a Consumer Reports press release, the national survey found that 71% of respondents said they were very concerned about companies selling or sharing their information about them without their permission. Another 65% of smartphone owners don't like that apps can access their contacts, photos, locations and other data without permission from them.

Other big concerns on the minds of the more than half of respondents: Advertisers going after kids with personalized ads based on their web-surfing data; companies keeping data even when it's not needed anymore and lastly, data about online activities and purchases being used to deny employment or affect their ability to get a loan." Read more

Comments for the Meaningful Use Commenters: Specificity Matters

Loonsk, John. "Comments for the Meaningful Use Commenters: Specificity Matters." Governement Health IT, April 2, 2012.

From the article: "Stage 2 of Meaningful Use has an increasing number of process measures that try to encourage health information exchange between and, by implication, inside of organizations. But asking for information exchange or interoperable systems without highly detailed, implementation guide “cookbooks” for each transaction means that the costs and burden rests with each healthcare provider. As far back as 2005 when HITSP started its work in the first national health IT agenda, there was a consensus assumption that standards-based, implementation-level guidance for health-related transactions was a principal need and goal. Stage I Meaningful Use had almost no implementation level guidance because, according to the Health IT Standards Committee, no guidance was ready. It is not clear there is more, well-tested implementation guidance available now for Stage 2, but fortunately there is still incrementally more in the regulation.

Comments that push back on implementation level guidance, while there are still process measures that demand the transactions occur, put healthcare providers on the hook for costs and effort for making ad hoc transactions happen. When adequate specificity of implementation guidance is present, much of the burden is shifted to the software developers. Instead of provider-funded, ad hoc transactions in each clinical setting, we get closer to having transactions that that can be built once by each vendor and used in many different implementations." Read more

A Privacy Manifesto in Code: What If Your Emails Never Went to Gmail and Twitter Couldn't See Your Tweets?

Madrigal, Alexis. "A Privacy Manifesto in Code: What If Your Emails Never Went to Gmail and Twitter Couldn't See Your Tweets?" The Atlantic, April 4, 2012.

From the article: "A new tool under development by Oregon State computer scientists could radically alter the way that communications work on the web. Privly is a sort of manifesto-in-code, a working argument for a more private, less permanent Internet.

The system we have now gives all the power to the service providers. That seemed to be necessary, but Privly shows that it is not: Users could have a lot more power without giving up social networking. Just pointing that out is a valuable contribution to the ongoing struggle to understand and come up with better ways of sharing and protecting ourselves online." Read more

If Court Squashes 'Obamacare,' IT May Suffer: HIMSS

Lewis, Nicole. "If Court Squashes 'Obamacare,' IT May Suffer: HIMSS." Information Week, April 2, 2012.

From the article: "If the Supreme Court rules that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, a number of health information technology-related provisions of the law will also fall, and that could disrupt health IT implementation plans, according Richard M. Hodge, senior director of Congressional Affairs at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).

But despite these concerns, Hodge told InformationWeek Healthcare, "We will find ways to move forward regardless of the court's decision. That may be through the private sector, [it] may be through other proposals and legislation…we'll just have to see how that unfolds." Read more

See Also
The Supreme Court Case on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, HIMSS fact sheet, March 22, 2012.

HIEs Must Plan for Security, Financial Viability to Survive: IDC

Horowitz, Brian T. "HIEs Must Plan for Security, Financial Viability to Survive: IDC." eWeek.com, April 3, 2012.

From the article: "Health information exchanges are beneficial for the continuity of care, but they require privacy and security strategies as well as an effective financial plan to survive, according to an April 2 report by research firm IDC Health Insights.  In the report, "Best Practices: Establishing Sustainable Health Information Exchange," IDC interviewed about 45 executives from organizations running enterprise, regional and statewide HIEs…. Health care organizations need to better understand how the technology behind HIEs will be funded before implementing the platforms, according to Lynne Dunbrack, program director of connected health IT strategies at IDC Health Insights." Read more

See Also
Dunbrack, Lynne, Best Practices: Establishing Sustainable Health Information Exchange, March 2012.

New Internet Users and Online Privacy Perceptions

Turner-Lee, Nicol E., New Internet Users and Online Privacy Perceptions (March 31, 2012).

From the abstract: "This paper explores how minorities and low-income people define, understand and act upon online privacy concerns, and how these communities are impacted by online behavioral advertising. The author’s research will address the degree to which new Internet users, especially people of color, seniors and youth, are often subjected to online targeted advertising due to their lack of experience managing privacy controls and permissions. The authors will present a final paper that integrates both qualitative research as gathered through focus groups and one on one interviews, and secondary analyses of existing research to offer policy recommendations that strive to protect these populations from “bad online actors” that promote predatory targeted advertising." Read more

Assessing the Influence of Online Activism on Internet Policy-Making: The Case of SOPA/PIPA

Powell, Alison, Assessing the Influence of Online Activism on Internet Policy-Making: The Case of SOPA/PIPA (March 30, 2012).

From the abstract: "This paper analyzes the influence of online activism, especially technical activist actions like web blackouts, on the policy-making process. It presents an assessment of the differential influence of various forms of policy advocacy, based on a review of all actions related to the Stop SOPA campaign, but particularly the web site blocks and shutdowns of January 18, 2012. Preliminary research suggests that most sites who participated left site access unchanged, but added symbolic blackouts or messages inviting citizens to contact their representatives. This suggests that the Jan 18 action was significant in 1. connecting the proposed laws with a discourse of internet censorship and 2. amplifying that discourse through online and mass media to provoke a policy response." Read more

Designing Surveillance Law

Bellia, Patricia L. "Designing Surveillance Law." Arizona State Law Journal, Vol. 43, No. 293, 2011; Notre Dame Legal Studies Paper No. 12-58.

From the abstract: "As communications surveillance techniques become increasingly important in government efforts to detect and thwart criminal and terrorist activities, questions of how to reconcile privacy and law enforcement interests take on paramount importance. These questions have institutional as well as substantive dimensions. That is, the issue is not simply what the limits on communications surveillance should be, but who should set them — courts through application of the Fourth Amendment or legislatures through statutes and the oversight process? The scholarly literature offers divergent positive and normative perspectives on these questions.

For most scholars, the question of who should regulate communications surveillance activities has a straightforward answer: the task is one for the courts applying the Constitution. Because constitutionally-based regulation of communications surveillance tactics has been relatively limited since the seminal case of Katz v. United States in 1967, such scholars view the surveillance law landscape as one reflecting judicial abdication: courts have largely failed at reining in executive discretion and must play a more active role. For a handful of other scholars, in contrast, the limited constitutionally-based regulation of surveillance tactics is not a cause for concern. Such scholars argue for legislative supremacy in surveillance law on the theory that courts lack the expertise to evaluate rapidly evolving technologies." Read more

Is Your Facebook Password Like Your Mail, House Key, or Drug Test?

Garber, Megan. "Is Your Facebook Password Like Your Mail, House Key, or Drug Test?" The Atlantic, April 3, 2012.

From the article: "Last week, Representative Ed Perlmutter, Democrat from Colorado, proposed an amendment to H.R. 3309, the Federal Communications Commission Process Reform Act of 2012, in reaction to news of employers, prospective and otherwise, demanding the passwords of employees' social media accounts. The amendment, colorfully shorthanded "MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS ON PASSWORDS," would have prohibited employers from demanding workers' social networking usernames and passwords -- and would have allowed the FCC to intervene on behalf of employees and their privacy. It would have codified, in other words, the notion that one's social media identity is an extension of one's broader identity, with the privacy protections (such as they are) that come along with the analogy.

A day after it was proposed, the amendment was voted down -- almost entirely along party lines -- thus closing one door to social media privacy legislation, at least on the national level. (There are similar social media privacy laws -- full bills, rather than amendments -- currently being proposed in the legislatures of Illinois, Maryland, and Michigan.)

But that's not the end of the story. In fact, it's just the beginning." Read more

ISACA: 58% Use Location-based Apps Despite Privacy Concerns

ISACA: 58% Use Location-based Apps Despite Privacy Concerns, ISACA press release, April 3, 2012.

From the press release: "Fifty-eight percent of consumers who have a smart device use location-based applications, despite concerns about safety and third-party use of their personal information for marketing purposes, according to a recent survey from nonprofit global information security association ISACA. 

A telephone poll of 1,000 Americans shows that many people have concerns or incomplete information about geolocation, which uses data acquired from a computer or mobile device to identify a physical location:

• Top concerns include third-party use of personal information for marketing purposes (24%) and strangers knowing too much about people’s activities (24%)
• Personal safety is the next biggest concern (21%)
• 43% of people do not read the agreements on apps before downloading them, and of those who do read the agreements, 25% believe these agreements are not clear about how location information is being used" Read more

See Also

Geolocation: Risk, Issues and Strategies, ISACA white paper, 2012.  

ICANN Leader Predicts Major Internet Changes

"ICANN Leader Predicts Major Internet Changes." SF Gate, March 30, 2012.

From the press release: "Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's President and Chief Executive Officer today said the Internet will change more in the next five years than it has in the past three decades. …Beckstrom said the future of the Internet will be defined by the very model of governance that ICANN embodies. "The Internet itself will depend on coordination and cooperation between its many stakeholders. We must continue to work together under principles of inclusion, consensus, multistakeholder participation, bottom-up decision making processes, transparency and accountability." Read more

Beware the Unholy Alliance of State and Internet

Morozov, Evgeny. "Beware the Unholy Alliance of State and Internet." The Financial Times, April 3, 2012.

From the opinion: "Instead of granting intelligence services more power, we need to worry about the coming convergence of the data-gathering demands of the state and the business imperatives of internet companies. Take a recent example: a few weeks ago, Google was granted a patent that would potentially allow it to use our phones to study the environment around us – to record noise levels, lighting conditions, temperature – and customise adverts accordingly. It’s easy to imagine that the folks at intelligence agencies would be quite delighted if Google developed this idea – at the very least, it would save them money on wiretaps.

….The idea that we need to make it easier for governments to do this, in the UK and elsewhere, is ludicrous. We need to be doing the exact opposite. It is only by anticipating the consequences of this coming unholy alliance between internet companies and intelligence agencies that our freedoms can be defended." Read more (registration may be required)

Internet Freedom Starts at Home

Mackinnon, Rebecca. "Internet Freedom Starts at Home." Foreign Policy, April 3, 2012.

From the article: "Yet more than two years after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her first speech declaring "Internet freedom" to be a major component of U.S. foreign policy, it turns out that many of the most sophisticated tools used to suppress online free speech and dissent around the world are actually Made in the USA. American corporations are major suppliers of software and hardware used by all sorts of governments to carry out censorship and surveillance -- and not just dictatorships. Inconveniently, governments around the democratic world are pushing to expand their own censorship and surveillance powers as they struggle to address genuine problems related to cybercrime, cyberwar, child protection, and intellectual property.

Even more inconveniently, the U.S. government is the biggest and most powerful customer of American-made surveillance technology, shaping the development of those technologies as well as the business practices and norms for public-private collaboration around them. As long as the U.S. government continues to support the development of a surveillance-technology industry that clearly lacks concern for the human rights and civil liberties implications of its business -- even rewarding secretive and publicly unaccountable behavior by these companies -- the world's dictators will remain well supplied by a robust global industry." Read more 

IT Investments Deliver Profits, Study Finds

Thibodeau. Patrick. "IT Investments Deliver Profits, Study Finds." Computerworld, April 3, 2012.

From the article: "Investing in IT departments can have a big impact on a firm's profits, more so than similar spending on R&D and some marketing endeavors, according to a team of university researchers.

The researchers reached their conclusions after examining the IT investments and financial data of about 450 companies in an effort to draw a link between IT spending and profits.

The work, published in the journal, MIS Quarterly, led to several key conclusions.

First, IT investments are "positively associated with profitability," according to the research paper.

The researchers said they were able to look deep enough at these unidentified global firms to draw insights into the type of IT investments that are most helpful. They found that companies are better off spending on projects that create revenue instead of reducing costs.

For instance, a company that builds or buys a business intelligence system that helps sell products will see more bottom line benefits than a company that spends IT dollars to automate internal processes to trim expenses, said the paper's lead author, Sunil Mithas, an associate professor Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland." Read more

See Also
Mithas, Sunil, A.Tafti, I. Bardhan and J.M. Goh. "The Impact of IT Investments on Profits." MIT Sloan Management Review, March 20, 2012.

John Dodge, March 30, 2012, "IT Investments Have Greater Impact on Profitability Than R&D or Advertising, MIT Reports," CIO blog.

NeHC Offers Guidance for Successful HIE

NeHC Offers Guidance for Successful HIE, National eHealth Collaborative press release, April 2, 2012.

From the press release: "National eHealth Collaborative (NeHC) today released the Health Information Exchange Roadmap: The Landscape and a Path Forward. This Roadmap offers stakeholders a clear picture of efforts being undertaken by both the public and private sectors to create and implement the building blocks for widespread deployment of interoperable HIE. It also provides an understanding of how these diverse approaches fit together into a cohesive strategy for nationwide HIE and suggests a four phase roadmap to help HIE initiatives make progress and become sustainable." Read more

See Also
Health Information Exchange Roadmap: The Landscape and a Path Forward, report by the National eHealth Collaborative, April 2, 2012.  

Buzz in the Blogosphere: Millions More Bloggers and Blog Readers

"Buzz in the Blogosphere: Millions More Bloggers and Blog Readers." Nielsen Wire, March 8, 2012.

From the article: "By the end of 2011, NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company, tracked over 181 million blogs around the world, up from 36 million only five years earlier in 2006…. It’s no surprise that the growing number of blogs mirrors a growth in bloggers. Overall, 6.7 million people publish blogs on blogging websites, and another 12 million write blogs using their social networks.

So, who are blog writers and what else do they do online?

• Women make up the majority of bloggers, and half of bloggers are aged 18-34
• Bloggers are well-educated: 7 out of 10 bloggers have gone to college, a majority of whom are graduates
• About 1 in 3 bloggers are Moms, and 52 percent of bloggers are parents with kids under 18 years-old in their household
• Bloggers are active across social media: they’re twice as likely to post/comment on consumer-generated video sites like YouTube, and nearly three times more likely to post in Message Boards/Forums within the last month" Read more

Becoming Accountable: Delivering Value-Based Care Through Optimal Use of IT and Data

Samitt, Craig E. "Becoming Accountable: Delivering Value-Based Care Through Optimal Use of IT and Data." iHealthBeat, April 2, 2012.

From the article: "As we evolve from a system of unit-based care to population-based care, we, as systems, will want to be able to benchmark our performance against other organizations, share un-blinded comparative data with clinicians regarding service, quality and cost, and transparently report data to our markets as a means of growing our practices and competing in the world of health insurance exchanges. We also will want to develop comprehensive "big data" data warehouses and analytics shops so that we can predictively model clinical information, identify areas of quality/safety/cost concerns and assess variations in practice patterns. We'll also want to develop a wider array of metrics of success, so that we know what good quality looks like, what good service feels like and what efficient care costs. 

While our assessment of quality today is mostly process metrics in primary care, we can predict that we'll move closer to outcome metrics in the future, and such metrics will exist not only for primary care, but for all specialties and all services, both inpatient and outpatient. While we struggle with the accuracy, transparency, format and availability of data today, we've invested heavily in data creation, analysis, reporting and modeling at Dean because it is quite clear to us that data will be king in the world of value." Read more

Overabundance of Medication Alerts Too Detailed to Help Busy Docs

Terry, Ken. "Overabundance of Medication Alerts Too Detailed to Help Busy Docs." Fierce Health IT, March 29, 2012.

From the article: "Too many medication alerts exist in electronic health records, and often times those alerts contain warnings that are too detailed to help busy clinicians, according to a new study by Indianapolis' Regenstrief Institute and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The institute calls the study first "in-depth look" at how physicians react to such alerts in EHRs…. Their paper, published in the International Journal of Medical Informatics, notes that prescribers were sometimes unsure of why an alert was appearing. The prompts seemed to be more oriented to pharmacists than doctors or nurses, despite the fact that the latter were the alerts' main recipients." Read more

See Also

Russ, Alissa and A. Zillich, M. McManus, B. Doebbeling, & J. Saleem. "Prescribers’ Interactions With Medication Alerts at the Point of Prescribing: A Multi-method, In Situ Investigation of the Human–Computer Interaction." International Journal of Medical Informatics, Volume 81, Issue 4 , Pages 232-243, April 2012.

Lab Tests Fell After HIE Rollout, Researchers Say

Conn, Joseph. "Lab Tests Fell After HIE Rollout, Researchers Say." Modern Healthcare, April 2, 2012.

From the article: "A study released by Harvard researchers that concluded that physicians who have computerized access to patients' test results are more likely to order additional lab and imaging tests has a new counterpoint by another team of Harvard researchers.

A three-page research letter, "Bridging the Chasm: Effect of Health Information Exchange on Volume of Laboratory Testing" (purchase required), published in the March 26 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, reports on a study that examined outpatient visits at two affiliated academic hospitals one year before and up to three years after a health information exchange was rolled out.

The study looked at 117,606 outpatient encounters at the two hospitals. The encounters occurred in 1999, the year before a health information exchange between them was rolled out, and in the years 2001 through 2004, when the HIE was in operation. Before and after the exchange's implementation, the researchers counted the number of laboratory tests ordered at either of the hospitals that occurred seven or fewer days before an outpatient visit at the other hospital, which the researchers call an "index encounter." Between the two study periods, before and after the exchange's implementation, 346 visits in which lab results were available from the "other" hospital took place."  Read more

See Also

Hebel, Esteban and B. Middleton, M. Shubina, & A.Turchin. "Bridging the Chasm: Effect of Health Information Exchange on Volume of Laboratory Testing." JAMA Archives of Internal Medicine, 2012;172(6):517-519.

Protecting Privacy in a TMI World

Leibowitz, John. "Protecting Privacy in a TMI World." The Washington Post, April 1, 2012.

From the opinion: "Over the past decade, as Americans have enthusiastically moved more and more of their lives online — from catching up on the latest NCAA results to buying a car, financing their college education or finding a job — we at the Federal Trade Commission have had to rethink what privacy means: to consider how consumers can continue to enjoy the riches of a thriving, increasingly online and mobile marketplace without surrendering their privacy as the price of admission.

Last week, the FTC, the nation’s premiere privacy protection agency, tackled that question with a report on the state of the right to privacy, what Louis Brandeis, one of the intellectual fathers of the FTC, called “the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” We detailed what we — in the public and private sectors — must do to make sure consumers’ right to privacy remains robust into the 21st century." Read more

See Also
FTC Issues Final Commission Report on Protecting Consumer Privacy, Federal Trade Commission press release, March 26, 2012.

Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool

Lichtblau, Eric. "Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool." The New York Times, March 31, 2012.

From the article: "Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show. The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations." Read more

Email and Web Use 'To Be Monitored' Under New Laws

"Email and Web Use 'To Be Monitored' Under New Laws." BBC News, April 1, 2012.

From the article: "Government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon. Internet firms will be required to give intelligence agency GCHQ access to communications on demand, in real time. The Home Office says the move is key to tackling crime and terrorism, but civil liberties groups have criticised it." Read more

World War 3.0

Gross, Michael Joseph. "World War 3.0." Vanity Fair, May 2012.

From the article: "When the Internet was created, decades ago, one thing was inevitable: the war today over how (or whether) to control it, and who should have that power. Battle lines have been drawn between repressive regimes and Western democracies, corporations and customers, hackers and law enforcement. Looking toward a year-end negotiation in Dubai, where 193 nations will gather to revise a U.N. treaty concerning the Internet, Michael Joseph Gross lays out the stakes in a conflict that could split the virtual world as we know it."  Read more