Wilbanks & Raskin on Privacy & Sharing in Health Data #LWTD

I’m hardly here anymore because I’m frantically working on a book chapter about transparency / privacy dynamics in e-science and e-health. Fool that I am, I thought this was going to be easy! Part of what makes it hard is that every single blessed day I open my computer and find at least a couple dozen new items on the topic that are absolutely incredible and should be included. As it turns out, I will probably not be including most of them, simply because this topic is so very huge. This one absolutely must be included, somehow.

This morning, Kim Whittemore pinged me on Twitter with a heads-up to check out the #LWDT hashtag stream. It turns out #LWTD stands for “Living Well Through Data” which also is, not coincidentally, the title of John Wilbanks absolutely amazing keynote for the conference. John is a huge fan of Creative Commons and other forms of sharing, so you can go to Slideshare and download the slides as well as viewing them here. He’s one of the visionaries behind the WeConsent.Us project, of which I am a huge fan, and which I’ve blogged about before.

The piece that absolutely stunned me from John’s presentation this morning was slide 42, about Aza Raskin’s privacy icons.

How on earth had I missed these? And how could I possibly complete my book chapter without them? These are so hugely important and central to issues of healthcare research, translational science, clinical trials, personalized medicine, and of course personal genomics. Here is more information on these privacy icons.

Mozilla Wiki: Privacy Icons, Beta: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Privacy_Icons

Aza Raskin: Privacy Icons, Alpha Release: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/privacy-icons/

Aza Raskin Discusses the Privacy Icon Project: http://vimeo.com/9049400

Aza Raskin discusses the Privacy Icons project from Dharmishta on Vimeo.