Category Archives: data

(your) information wants to be free

Posted on April 28, 2011 by ben

A couple of weeks ago, Epsilon, an email marketing firm, was breached. If you are a customer of Tivo, Best Buy, Target, The College Board, Walgreens, etc., that means your name and email address were accessed by some attacker. You … Continue reading →

Posted in data, privacy, security | 9 Comments

grab the pitchforks!… again

Posted on April 19, 2011 by ben

I’m fascinated with how quickly people have reached for the pitchforks recently when the slightest whiff of a privacy/security violation occurs. Last week, a few interesting security tidbits came to light regarding Dropbox, the increasingly popular cloud-based file storage and … Continue reading →

Posted in crypto, data, privacy, web | 10 Comments

The Health IT report is very good; some opinionated suggestions

Posted on December 8, 2010 by ben

“Oy,” I thought, when I received a copy of “REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT REALIZING THE FULL POTENTIAL OF HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY TO IMPROVE HEALTHCARE FOR AMERICANS: THE PATH FORWARD” [PDF]. I worried this would be a lot of vague, easy-to-agree-with … Continue reading →

Posted in data, health, privacy | 2 Comments

devices, payload data, and why Kim is (in part) right.

Posted on June 1, 2010 by ben

A few days ago, I wrote about privacy advocacy theater and lamented how some folks, including EPIC and Kim Cameron, are attacking Google in a needlessly harsh way for what was an accidental collection of data. Kim Cameron responded, and … Continue reading →

Posted in data, policy, privacy | 5 Comments

distributed innovation

Posted on April 21, 2010 by ben

A few years ago, a small group of folks (Mark Birbeck, Steven Pemberton, Ralph Swick, Shane McCarron, me, and more recently Ivan Herman, Manu Sporny, and a lot of great new folks) started with the simple idea that, if web … Continue reading →

Posted in data, web | 3 Comments

Taxing Human Transactions – Part 1

Posted on February 18, 2010 by ben

The worst part of my job is dealing with the mess of document formats and coding systems in healthcare. The acronym soup is insane: HL7, CCD, CCR, CDA, Green CDA (which I just heard about from John Halamka’s blog but… … Continue reading →

Posted in data, health, policy | 1 Comment

Apple fanboy delusions, the Palm Pre is looking mighty tasty

Posted on October 7, 2009 by ben

On many issues, I’m an Apple fanboy. On the issue of the iPhone, less and less. Here’s the short version of the story: Apple produces iTunes, which manages all of your music and videos, and syncs them to your iPod/iPhone. … Continue reading →

Posted in data, policy | Leave a comment

Stefano thinks I’m a purist…

Posted on September 25, 2009 by ben

Stefano Mazzocchi is awesome and his thinking on Web-based data is incredibly nuanced and pragmatic, so it’s not often that I want to publicly disagree with him. But in his latest post, I think he’s off the mark. Stefano argues: … Continue reading →

Posted in data, web | Leave a comment

Pot, Kettle, meet Zuckerberg

Posted on June 23, 2009 by ben

Facebook is an impressive company, they’ve done and continue to do some very amazing things. And I admit I certainly didn’t see them coming 4 years ago. But okay, come on: “No one wants to live in a surveillance society,” … Continue reading →

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Open Licensing in Health IT

Posted on June 23, 2009 by ben

John Halamka, renowned CIO of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), is a blogger, and he just added a Creative Commons license after making the following remarks: I want my blog to be used for education, training, and research. … Continue reading →

Posted in data, health, policy | 6 Comments