iCrowds

Some uses of social technologies and big data are really surprising. When you collect lots of information about DNA and diseases it is logical that you can identify certain DNA sequences that pose an extra risk.

I came across the site my.microbes.eu that I was really flabbergasted about. Our bodies contain almost 2 kilos of bacteria, mainly in our guts. We live with these batteries in symbiosis, we would not survive without them. However, imbalances between these bacterias and their context (us..) can lead to severe problem for many people. Bowel problems are for many people a constant and nagging problem.

These problems can sometimes be improved by the right diet, avoiding certain activities or medication. However, due to the often vague and diverse nature of this problem it is hard to find the right solution for a specific person.

Enter my.mcrobes.eu. This website is based in a scientific project to collect data about the microbes living in our guts. However, the interesting thing they are doing is that they connect people worldwide that have the same microbial profile. Assumption is of course that people that have the same microbial profile benefit from the same diets or exercises. By bringing these people in contact with each other they can exchange information on how they are dealing with their issues.

To me this is a great example how big data (large quantities of similar data) and social technologies create surprising new combinations.

In general I am big supporter of “small is beautiful”. People perform best in contexts that they can relate to and where they know people. A famous example is the 50 employee limit of the old BSO cells. This is especially important in healthcare… being a personal and social branch. However, there is an important exception: Big DATA.

Last november there was a conference where several parties presented their thoughts and ideas about Big DATA in care.

In healthcare it is important to do research on patterns of symptoms that will end up to be incurable illnesses. In breast cancer research, massive examining of images (X-ray, MRI, CT, ..) has led to all kinds of visual patterns that give strong evidence of future risks of cancer. In breast cancer this works (in the Netherlands) partially, but there are numerous other areas that can benefit from the research into massive amounts of Big DATA.

However, it is often difficult to get access to these massive amounts of data. Hospital records are scattered around and can’t be accessed easily, even within a single hospital. Privacy and expertise on ensuring anonymity is often an issue in distributing data.

One posibility is to learn from industries that have more experience with big data. For example,Izovator -experts in storage of content in the media industries – created a shared environment for hospitals where storage would become much cheaper and where tools to access and work with this data would be available, based on standards. This led to the realization that getting access to all these images in a central location has tremendous opportunity; to do research on patterns that can be found in these massive amounts of data. And these patterns will help future patients in better prevention and cure.

Sharing big data becomes the next BIG step towards a better care!

Technology means different things for different people. That means that we need a lot more user involvement in the development of technologies for elderly. However, most technologies are developed by people in a different age bracket than the elderly people they are meant for. In the video below you see an advertisement where a company tries to sell an advanced alarm button with video to their elderly customers. Look at 40″ how horribly ugly that alarm button is.

My grandmother had such a button but almost never wore it since she would not be caught dead with such an ugly accessory (even at 93 and still a bit vain). Research shows that more than 50%(*) of the people that have such an alarm often do not wear the button because the feel stigmatized by wearing it.

These companies spend lots of money on the development of software and hardware but almost never ask their customers what is it exactly that they want and what it should look like. I am even convinced there is a market for “designer alarm buttons”.

Question is how to involve them in a way that can show what technology does and how it can help them, in stead of leaving them with incomprehensible technologies. But that will be discussed in one of the next postings.

(*) Porter, E.J. (2005). Wearing and using personal emergency respone system buttons. Journal of Gerontological Nursing, 31(10), 26-31.

Loneliness is one of the big issues in elderly care, partly due big societal changes. 50 years ago most people died less than 15 kilometer from the place that they were born. This meant that families for the most part lived close together and had frequent contact with each other. Nowadays families often live all over the country. Distance is a big hurdle for intimate contact. Also, the loss of the church as the place where generations meet every Sunday is an important factor. It is much harder to ignore loneliness when you physically meet every week.

(Digital) conversations against loneliness

Games are always a great seducer to get people to interact with one another. In WordFeud the possibility also exists to chat with your opponent while playing a game. This leads to lots of conversations, often between elderly and their family but also between strangers. Conversation diminishes loneliness and less loneliness leads to less doctor visits… The best examples for the creation of social technologies in healthcare can often be found in everyday life. When families get together they also often play boardgames like Scrabble. I fondly remember the games of Scrabble we played with my grandmother. WordFeud brings this same mechanism to our digital lives. And often keeping the conversation alive through a digital channel enhances the meetings in real live.

Also published on www.tedxmaastricht.nl

Care, Society and Technology

One of the interesting aspects of Google+ is the concept of Circles. The idea is that in real life you have different circles of friends to whom you communicate differently. There is no single you but there are several you’s that are a bit different depending on the context. Most people act a   different towards their boss, their old university friends and towards familiy.

There is however one aspect missing that I think will turn out to be crucial to it’s succes: uncertainty.

Friendship is by definition two sided. It does not have to be symmetrical (meaning you both feel the same towards eachother) but at least there is to be some level of reciprocity. Most group of friends consist of a small group of people that have a high level of reciprocity and close bonds in their relations to each other. Around that group there is a larger community where the level of reciprocity is not consistent for the whole core group. They are sort of in the group and out of the group at the same time, depending on who you ask.

This foggy definition of a circle of friends is something we as humans need since we deal badly with rejection. This lack of Transparancy makes it possible to create blurry edges for people to feel in while in fact they are only partly accepted. This blurry edge however does create a gradual path for people to move into the circle step by step. This is something we probably all recognise from our own experience, especially during school.

Because of this transparancy in Circles what you end up with is the relationships type in LinkedIn where everyone is a friend since it is too confronting to reject someone as a friend. And when everyone is you friend than no one is.

So unless Google is able to build in a combination of reciprocity and bit of vagueness in circles my prediction is that it will not succeed. If they (or Facebook) does succeed in modelling how friendships works in real life than that social network will win the battle. Because, aren’t we all looking for friends?

For a project in eHealth I have adopted the speech from Kennedy where he pledges to focus many efforts in order to put a man on the moon. Because, as he says, “not because it is easy, but because it is hard”

Looking at this speech is still amazing after all those years. Not just because of the eloquence of Kennedy but because of the idealistic spirit of a society that sets a goal and is willing to make great sacrifices in order to achieve that goal. I think in our age and time we have lost some of that willingness to put society first and the individual second.

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

And of course, as he promised, this was the result on July 1969.

A few weeks ago I read a book from Jaron Lanier: “You are not a Gadget“. I am a fan of Jaron Lanier, I think he is one of the few sillicon valley insiders that really tries to think hard about the effect technology has on our lives and societies.

There was one part of the book that really got me thinking and it was about the loss of the local notables.

If we look at the long tail from Chris Anderson we are now  seeing that the long tail does exist but also creates havoc in a lot of professions due to the price pressure of the (often quite capable) amateurs. This counts for filmmakers, photographers and many other professions where there are also a lot of amateurs craving for attention. There are of course some that are succeeding and even flourishing but as a profession they are hit hard

A second effect is that in some cases there are winners that really take it all. Examples like Google, Facebook, Amazon and (some) others. These have become highly profitable companies that have become un-beatable monopolies in markets they often created themselves (but we now can not do without..).

What we are now losing is the middle ground, the vanishing local notables. On the one hand we have highly profitable de-facto monopolies and at the other end of the scale we have hordes of amateurs whose business model consist of their 15 seconds of fame and a proverbial Apple. In the area in between in the past lots of people were able to get relatively rich on a local level. The doctor, the lawyer, the local care dealer, the supermarket owner. their numbers are going down due to the transfer of part of their business to the few (global) winners and part of their business to amateurs that work for an Apple.

With their disappearance we also see a disappearance of local culture since these often were the people and companies that supported local activities. We may gain some brilliant cultural  institutions like “The concertgebouw orkest” but we will lose many local orchestra’s, museums but also social activities that will not be sponsored anymore by the local notables.

In the digital realm this is probably an enhancement of our lives. After all, we only need one concertgebouworkest since we can listen to their breathtaking digital recordings for ever after. However, we also have a physical local presence that we should cherish.

What is the answer to this dilemma I do not know, neither does Jaron. But it is certainly something we will have to think about in the years ahead.

For many open source is a great example of innovation. Software like Linux, Apache, Joomla and OpenOffice have thriving communities that create great software. however, these products are not innovative. Linux is a clone from Unix that was developed in the 60′s, Apache is just another webserver, Joomla is one of the many content management systems and OpenOffice tries to mimic Word.

At the start of the open source movement the statement was that Open Source was to be free like in free speech, not as in free beer. In English the word free has two connotations: free as in gratis (no money) and free as in libre (free to go). Unfortunately open source has become free beer.

For an innovative product to be sustainable it needs a business model. Picture a young programmer that, in his time off from his day job, creates an innovative product that others start to use. After some time more and more demands will be made for new functionality and the solving of bugs. More and more of his free time will be spent on this product. He can not quit his day job because his innovative product does not bring in money in license fees since it is gratis. After some time he quits the project. Sourceforge, the place where many open source projects have a home, is filled with interesting but nonetheless failed projects like these. Sourceforge is the place where projects go to die ..

The main reason why a few examples like Joomla and Linux survive is because of many companies around it make money by delivering services. Because it is not innovative it is a product category that is understood by potential customers that are willing to pay for services implementing it. What we need is a business model for the software itself. What we need to do is to severe the connection between the openness of the software (to be able to inspect code is a good thing) and the business model behind it (being able to make a living creating great products).

We run the risk that the same thing now is happening in the open data movement. Pressure is set on several organizations to open up their data so app developers can build applications on top of it. We should realize that, once these organizations do not make money on that data, that the quality and access to that data will not be of strategic importance to them. We should as much as possible enforce the openness of the data to prevent a monopoly of information access. But the original creators of that data should be able to make a llving out of it.

Data should be free like in free speech, not as in free beer …

Due to my renewed interest in “Pancakes” I was looking for some info in my archive (yes, the paper one…). In the past I have worked for a company called BSO, founded by Eckart Wintzen. During the years I worked there I was director of a consultancy cell (I’ll explain the term cell later on), technical manager, commercial manager and director in the electronic commerce service line before leaving the company in 1999.

Eckart was a remarkable person, sometimes a bit difficult but always inspiring and, well, very present. He developed the vision that people work best in small teams up to 50 people. And implemented this vision!

When he left in 1996 the company had more than 4000 employees but was divided in units not larger than 50 people, called a Cell (from the biological cell). When a group grew to big it was split up and half the management team and employees started a new cell in a different place. There Board was doing their best not to steer the cells directly but tried to convince. There was almost no middle management (and nobody listened to them anyway). In many ways it was a Pancake organization before the electronic means were there. This was possible because Eckart was one of the few CEO’s that did not like raw power for himself.

Anyway, while looking into my archive I found the letter below that was part of the yearly report of 1995 (the reports were always very special, this one was designed as a folding map were you put in several papers between tabs (some of you elderly people will remember them!). This letter describes (in Dutch) how the Internet is not so much about infrastructure and computers but about connecting people and was written by the director of the McLuhan program (BSO was a sponsor of this program). Quote:

Het beeld van een wereldomspannende netwerkomgeving is niet zozeer dat van een ‘snelweg’ als wel dat van een soort ‘wereldgeest’

The concept of a worldwide network is not as much about a ‘highway’ but more about some sort of world ‘conscience’.

Funny how many of these issues already came together in 1995..

The building of the General Motors Headquarters in the 1920's. A textbook example of the big Firm

A couple of years ago I read the book “De eeuw van mijn vader” (“My father’s century”) from Geert Mak. In this book he describes how the Dutch society has changed from 1900 to 2000. One of the passages that struck me most was his statement that the majority of people in 1900 were not an employee at a firm. Many people were self employed as sail maker, baker, carpenter and other craftsmanships. Other were employed on a temporary basis as day laborer. For many people this independence meant of course mainly insecurity and near starvation.

It did open my eyes that the big Firm as a way to organize work is something relatively recent and started around that time. Before the Firm work was done by many individual and small informal companies, afterwards much of the work is done in large companies with often an emphasis on management and control. At the same time there was the shift from mainly local transactions to global transactions.

These days we again see a move towards smaller size of companies and and more informal contacts to coordinate work. Most important example is of course the explosion of Independent Professionals. But also many examples of small companies that supply a specific service, often on a global scale, like BasecampHQ, Evernote and others. My conclusion is that the Social Media and Cloud and the themes they bring forth put pressure on the size of Firms. Big is beautiful nor efficient anymore.

In 1936 (Nobel price winner) Robert Coase wrote the artikel “The nature of the Firm”. In this (very famous and often cited) article he states that the size of a Firm is based on the difference in transaction costs between the market (buying the service) and organizing the service yourself. He describes the relation between transaction costs and size as follows. The firm grows when:

• the less the costs of organizing and the slower these costs rise with an increase in the transactions organized.
• the less likely the entrepreneur is to make mistakes and the smaller the increase in mistakes with an increase in the transactions organized.
• the greater the lowering (or the less the rise) in the supply price of factors of production to firms of larger size.

Transaction costs in this are all costs associated with a transaction: communication, contracts, delivery, etc. If we compare these with the themes Scalability, Communication, Cooperation, Anyplace and Anywhere and Transparency it is clear that these themes are lowering the external transaction costs dramatically.

Scalability: the advantage of the Firm has always been that within the Firm it is easier to share resources over several activities. Now many operational costs have become variable costs in relation to turnover this advantage of size is not valid anymore. The risks of major investments in infrastructure is therefore also largely diminished. Due to the high level of automated processes there is less advantage in high volumes of purchasing

Communication and Cooperation: Finding people has become easy, contacting them has become easy and exchanging information on specifications and expectations has become easy. This means that transaction costs go down. This holds mainly for external costs since internally searching and working with people was enabled by the Firm.

Anytime, Anywhere: The Firm creates a context where it is easier to know what to expect from others and has a management structure to enforce compliance to this context. Social technology now enables us to contact everybody from everywhere at any moment. A natural advantage of the firm was that it was easier to do business within the Firm on a global scale. Now small companies can do the same in a virtual enterprise.

Transparency: We now see reputation mechanisms to build trust without previous experience with that person of service. We see reviews of previous experience of others that are similar to us. We know we are looking at the same data stored in the cloud. I know where you really are because of location based services. This transparency drives down risk immensely.

From all of the above it follows that due to social and cloud technologies Firms will shrink in size. Small will be more efficient. This also has a lot of impact on middle management whose role it was to coordinate work in the Firm. This coordinating role of management will evaporate and thereby create flatter organizations: Pancakes!

Fractals create fascinating pictures. On the one hand they look very structured and symmetrical but when you look closer you see that the pattern is repeated in a different way on every level. There is order and there is chaos simultaneously. The math behind fractals is surprisingly simple. The trick is that the factors in the equation repeat themselves in a recursive way (meaning that the formula calls itself withing the formula).

For example, the formula for the fractal on the right is “(1 − z3 / 6) / (z − z2 / 2)2 + c” (for more info on these fractals go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_set). Many of natures most beautiful expressions are based in Fractals, e.g. leafs , trees and flowers. Here the relatively simple codes in the DNA create fascinating structures in the organism.

The mechanism is similar with the effects of new technology on our way of living and working. At the moment we see many fields of business changing in very profound and different ways. Often due to wide spread implementations of new developments like Cloud technologies (that impacts how business interact) and Social Media (that impacts how people interact).

However, the driving forces behind this change are relative simple. The basic variables that are impacted by this change in technology are:

• Unlimited Scalability: Technology and processes become scalable. IT costs become a variable costs. This means that a company can start small and grow evolutionary. Communities can be scaled up from a few to hundred thousands of people in a short period. This flexibility gives rise to new competitors and new services that had not been possible before.
• Ubiquitous Communication: (Social) Technology makes it possible to find the person with the right knowledge instantaneously. Communication channels are easy to access for broadcasting to targeted audiences as well as direct interaction.
• Seamless Cooperation: We have now been given the freedom to work and cooperate everywhere. Where in the past closed systems made it difficult to work together it is now made possible by standardized tools in the cloud. Sharing data, sharing tools and sharing contacts is now possible.
• Anytime, Anywhere: Instead of real-time communication in a specific place we are now free to interact wherever and whenever. Many of our tools support direct communication (chat) as well as a-synchronous communication (e-mail). Changes made in an online document are always seen directly by all so they can be reacted upon. In many ways we overcome the limitations that a physical world imposes on us
• Maximum Transparency: With the use of Cloud technology information can be visible to all and often is.  In the past systems were closed by default since databases could be accessed only from a few places. Now all you need is an Internet connection and a browser. Also by sharing much of our thoughts, activities and trivialities a sometimes unexpected amount of transparency is achieved, though sometimes accidentally.

All these themes create tremendous opportunity but also unexpected risks and consequences. As society and as businesses we have to learn how to optimize these themes to create good and sustainable outcomes. The differences between MySpace and Facebook were small at the start …

Last few weeks I have been trying to integrate a lot of ideas I have been working on in the last few years. Partly in research programs on SaaS, partly and several project around the adoptation of technology and partly from my own company. Below is the (extend) set of sheets I have made out of this. Next period I will be writing a bit about the different parts of it.

 

Opleveringspresentatie HAN voor wireless Arnhem

Originally uploaded by Martijn Kriens

Gisteren hebben we de eind presentatie gehad voor het onderzoek naar de positionering van Wireless Arnhem in de binnenstad. Goed rapport geworden waarbij we het advies hebben gekregen om minder op het netwerk en meer op de marketing kant te richten. Een advies dat we van harte gaan nemen!

De studenten die het project hebben uitgevoerd zijn:

We all know that in our western societies we have an age problem. We have more and more elderly and less and less young people. In many ways this is an achievement of our societies (who does not want to become old) but it poses us for new questions. When we get old, who will do the work needed?

You can calculate that in 2025 the workload per employee that takes care for elderly people will be twice as high. I think that is one of the challenges we have for the next decades.

ICT will be one of the means to deliver an answer to this challange. ICT to increase productivity (like care from a distance) but also ICT that gives more control to people so they can take care of themselves (e.g. with social media).

Last week we started a program focused around these two types of potential for ICT in the elderly care. In this program we bring together people from healthcare organizations, universities and companies (www.health-lab.nl). During this kickoff we had around 50 people of management level together.

One of the interesting discussions we had was about the role of commercial companies. My statement is that we need commercial companies to grow from all kinds of well meant pilots to mature markets. Only in a mature market there will be technology available for everyone and not just in a subsidized pilot. In this discussion it was clear that in the world of care there is some tension between commerce and care. I hope with the Health-lab program we can lower the barriers between these worlds.

With the company ReMarketable we are working on a “Medical Data Recorder” for operating rooms. Just like the flight data recorder (aka the black box in a aeroplane). I The flight data recorder is an important aide in the safety culture of aviation since a) pilots know that all actions are recorded and can be reviewed and b) after an accident there is always objective and factual data on the condition how things went wrong. There is of course a difference between pilots and surgeons. However, the way the safety and quality culture can be enhanced looks very much the same. A medical data recorder will play an important role in this.

Today an article is published in Spits about the medical black box and a radio interview was held with us on Radio 1 at the AVRO.

You can find the article here.

Sometimes I have the feeling there are too many communication channels. Lately I have been using twitter a lot and I see that it distracts me from writing the blog. You can only spend you time once.

Nice thing about the blog is that it forces you to think about a (small) subject and in order to say something coherent about it. Twitter is much more instant gratification it seems: fun but also easily flushed. Let’s see if I can switch back to the blog a bit more.

Sometimes you find something that leaves you breathless. The look and sound of this video really makes me speechless.

Lykke Li – Tonight from Lykke Li on Vimeo.

This is sooo cool. People at sprxmobile.com made a special augmented reality browser, called Layar. What is does is that is show you digital reality over the physical reality in the screen of your phone. For example you point you phone at a house and over the camera picture it is shown if it is for sale and what is the price. Look below.

All kinds of interesting applications can be made with this. In a project in the Amsterdam Living Lab we are piloting an application like this to find out how people will use such a service, especially when they are able to leave digital information behind that others can see with their phone. It may be that we will use the Layar technology instead of the home grown one. Of course a phone with and a GPS and a compass is needed like the Google phone or the latest iPhone 3gs.

Tinkebell

Regarding privacy a lot of fuss is often made about the information that the government collects about this. And I must say the government collects a lot.

An interesting case recently was with two criminals in the Netherlands. After stealing 21 cars they have been apprehended. The police stores every license plate in a database of every care that drives on the highway at Zwolle. It turned out that each time a stolen car drove by the same car was just behind it. This is the first time that the judge has to decide if this large database of car movements in the Netherlands can be legally used to search for clues.

As for the storage of personal information we can distinguish three domains who has access to the information: the government, (networks of) companies and the Internet.

As for the Government I am not that worried. I do believe that we have a strong democracy that will correct itself when information is misused too often. Of course that government may change. However, when it changes the government would start to implement a lot more means to spy on us anyway. As long as the use of the information is transparent I won’t lose much sleep over it.

As for companies it starts to become more complex. Banks, Supermarkets, web-stores, Google and others collect huge amounts of data. When companies combine this information it makes you feel digitally naked. Sometimes this is information that is collected without the person knowing that it is collected.

The website geencommentaar.nl had collected the IP addresses of people that signed a petition with false names after a post at another website, geenstijl.nl that asked people to invalidate the petition. These IP addresses where than supplied to other websites in order to block the people behind it. The CBP has taken action in this case.

There are rules to what kind of information can be combined but it is often a shady area. In the example above it became transparent but especially in commercial environments it will often be hidden. The risks are significant. Much of this information in the hands of insurance companies will lead to a risk selection that is, from a societal point of view, not what we want. The acquisition of hospitals by insurance companies is a dangerous move in this respect.

In this case we are talking about information collected by (fairly large) companies. And companies can be found and are subject to regulations. This means that with a good legal framework it is a subject that can be controlled to a large extent.

As for Internet things are getting messy. The Internet is more and more used by people as the context to interpret information. If someone applies for a job he or she is googled. If a social worker is looking into a case it is not only the “kinddossier” that they look at but also hyves is checked. Internet has become the context in which official information is interpreted. And context information may be more important than the official information…

Problem which information on the Internet is that it is much harder to control in presence and in use. You can not stop a company from using the information on a potential pregrancy of a candidate that they have found. And you often can not have information removed that you do not like. And sometimes people leave information on websites that is plain false in order to harm someone.

People should become much more aware how much information can be found on them. Tinkebell recently published a book with all the hate-mail she got combined with personal information of the people that had send this e-mail. The people sending the hate-mail had the idea that they could send their messages in anonymity. Of 30% of the hate-mail she has received she could find extensive personal information on the net and has published this personal information together with hate-mail. I think a brilliant action.

We can not stop the amount of personal information on the Net. It is not just the information you publish yourself but also information others publish about you. What we need is some sort of digital mirror that shows us how the world sees us through the eyes of the Internet. Just like the mirror that hangs in you hallway and where you check your physical representation before going into the world. And like how we use clothes to create an image to the outside world we will pro-actively plant information on the net to create the image we want.

Have you already checked you profile?

A small row in the UK because the wife of the new head of MI6 has placed pictures of her family including her husband on Facebook including information on the place where they live, where they go on holiday and other information. I think this is a good example of how more and more people are used to publicising information on themselves that they would not have thought about publicising some years ago.

Reaction of the foreign secretary: ‘It is not a state secret that he wears Speedo swimming trunks. Let’s grow up.’

Of course he is right on the swimming trunks. I omitted that picture not of secrecy but of bad taste … However this is an example how social networking is becoming part of our everyday existence and that even the family of the head of MI6 do not realize the width of the audiences like Facebook has.

Some time ago I wrote about the dangers of developments like child dossiers used by governments. One of the major risks is that people that will use this information use it without knowledge of the context when the information was stored. Information without context is hard to interpret leaves a lot of room for personal biases.

The Rathenau project I am doing deals with how the information anyone can find on the Internet will more and more become the context from which much of the official information in databases like Electronic Patient Files, Child Dossier, Civil Administration and others will be interpreted. This I showed also in the case on the social services. And many will recognize how they are using information found on the Internet as the context of the CV of a job applicant.

In relation to the social services we can debate whether this is a bad thing. After all the government also used special “kliklijnen” where people can complain anonymous about the black market activities of their neighbour on welfare. Not to say I approve of this method but it is legal.

But what about a health insurance company that starts to search the Internet for information on their patients. By law the insurance company has no access to the patients medical record. Are they allowed to factor in the information they can find on the Internet? I would say not but how can we prevent them from using this information. We can not prevent them from finding this information…

An example someone from CBP gave made me think. Say a woman just found out she is pregnant and has discussed morning sickness on a forum on the Internet. A week later she has a job interview where the HR manager has found this information. Even though as a society we have accepted that a potential pregnancy should not be discussed in job interviews we can not prevent people from using this information when they accidentally find it. And due to all kinds of mechanism I will discuss soon it is getting harder to stay anonymous on the Internet.

We can and should not control the information that is on the Internet. But on the one hand we will have to develop laws that govern what institutions are allowed to use and on the other hand we ourselves will have to deal with the fact that much personal information can be found.

Unless of course your name is Jan Jansen…

Google is at the moment making pictures of all the citys in the Netherlands for their streetview service. Besides this being a usefull service (what does that area look like) it leads to some bizarre situations:

• In some cases Google has by accident photographed famous dutch people. Even though the faces are blurred in most cases the people are still clearly recognisable. This may of course be a problem since it makes the place where someone lives visible for everyone.
• In one case a crime is even solved. Some time ago a person was mugged in the street, just a the moment the Google streetview care was driving by taking pictures. The criminals got away. After some months the person looked at the streetview pictures of that location and to his surprise he could see himself and the boys that mugged him running away. He called the police, they called Google for the un-blurred pictures and got them. The criminals are apprehended.

Streetview now even has it’s own site where remarkable pictures can be found. Two people walking hand in hand on four separate pictures and others, famous people, people driving through red and others. The sheer amount of pictures that are being taking leads to all kinds of new questions how we should deal with it in relation to privacy.

How do you feel about this trend, do you see it as an invasion of your privacy?

I suppose you all know the statement that during hard economic times that the economy has the flu (and as they say, when Germany sneezes we in Holland get pneumonia). Recently I wrote something about the flu monitor of Google.

Google also has recognised this resemblence between catching the flu and economic recession and has introduced an economic barometer. By paying attention to the nature of search words (new car is positive but occasion negative, vacation is good but golf vacation is better ..) they show the trend how people are feeling.

I suspect that this will work pretty good. The terms people use are very much dependent on how they feel at that moment so this barometer will say something about how the general population is feeling (or better, how the feeling changes over time). Sometimes they can be very mistaken of course (many people search for Ferrari’s without being able to buy them anyhow. I sometimes search for beautiful destinations for vacations I know I will not make. A little bit of dreaming is nice ..). But in general this really might work.

Looks like the recession wont be ending any time soon, now that makes me feeling depressed …

(to get in the mood for this posting you need to repeat the title of the article in a deeply sinister voice, you will understand why at the end of the posting ..)

At the moment I am working on a project for Rathenau institute relating to privacy and the information you can find on individuals on the Internet. I was talking to a friend who works for social security in a large city and he said that the Internet is a source they often use to get information about people.

One of the sites they are using is www.wieowie.nl. This is a service that queries information about a person from all kinds of sources: google, yahoo, schoolbank, hyves and others. But it also finds telephone numbers, the tags that relate to that person, photos and document that are associated with you.

It turns out that they regularly find information about people that points towards fraud. For example somebody who is asked by someone else how her vacation was in Mexico. At the social security service they for example can see that that person did not register for a vacation. Result can be that the person is invited to come to city hall to show her passport that may have a Mexican visa stamp in it….

This is an example of a new type of transparency that is becoming more and more pervasive in society. And it is not just the information you yourself put on the Internet. In the example above it can also be some of you friends discussed on hyves a story that you told them about your vacation.

In a way I think transparency is good. It can help us be more authentic. But it can also be a dangerous instrument when people trust too much on information that may be wrong or even distorted on purpose. As society we need to think about how to deal with this type of transparency.

Happy Holidays!