Want a new job? Nope! We don't want someone with your condition on our team.
Want to buy a house? Nope! An AI bot says may not live long enough to pay the loan.
Want to get some ice cream? Can't haz. When you swipe your electronic payment method the database says you're at a risk for diabetes.
There are thousands of other scenarios.
> The vulnerabilities could allow an unauthorized individual (i.e. someone other than a health care professional) to access and potentially change the settings of an implantable device, home monitor or clinic programmer.
Ok cool, so there's millions of implantable cardioverter defibrillators whose voltages can be changed by someone who sits nearby at a restaurant. If they up the ampage high enough, the patient has a heart attack.
Now, what if I found out that a sitting president or other elected politician had a small electronic defibrillator implanted in their chest? We could see targeted assassinations look like medical device malfunctions when in reality someone learned about this device, built an exploit for it, and hired someone to sit within bluetooth range to deliver the payload.
It's not impossible to do. Unlikely, sure, but this is a result of the high-tech world we are living in.
[1]: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/03/25/medtronic-cardia...
[2]: https://global.medtronic.com/xg-en/product-security/security...
> Want a new job? Nope! We don't want someone with your condition on our team.
There are laws in some countries that could forbid such discrimination. Even if the employer lies about the true reasons, lies don't go unpunished forever. The parent is right about it, they are cultural biases.
> Want to buy a house? Nope! An AI bot says may not live long enough to pay the loan.
As said by another reply, your example is purely fictional. Even if it was true, there could be a culture change and new laws to support those people in need.
> Want to get some ice cream? Can't haz. When you swipe your electronic payment method the database says you're at a risk for diabetes.
Again, fictional example.
> There are thousands of other scenarios.
Sure, if you use all the words in the English dictionary, you can create billions of sentences, but very few will be actually close to the truth...
Nobody cares whether you pay or not, as long as the property value isn't under water. They want you to die. If you die without an heir who can take over the payments (perhaps with the help of insurance money), they get everything you paid so far, and the property.
Imagine you used to have cancer and beat it, and independent of that fact are looking for a new job that offers health insurance.
If your condition every resurfaces, you're going to be a real expensive hire for your employer in terms of time off (for treatments and recovery) and your new health insurance provider.
You might be so expensive that they decide not to hire you, or decide not to cover you.
If you want to think of your own cases, think about medical conditions that have been stigmatized over the course of history and how people's actual lives are effected by them.
In addition, many diseases like STD/STIs or mental illness carry a stigma. Information like that, if inadequately protected, can have a social or even financial cost like losing your job.
I don't think changing society to not be embarrassed about things being made public is a good solution to privacy concerns.
Also, we might have a million, non-embarrassment reasons to want to keep things private. I might not want people to know about my cancer because I want to be able to live my life without having to answer questions about it, or have people treat me as delicate. I might not want people to know I am pregnant because I don't want to have to tell them when I have a miscarriage.
Most importantly, I want to be able to have whatever arbitrary reasons I want to keep things private.
Because it's detailed, personal, intimate information about you and your immediate family.
Even if there may be some upsides from releasing portions of it, it must be up to you to control and opt into.
What if you were HIV+ or taking Viagra? What if you were just sick and didn’t want to be discriminated against?
There are life and death implications in medical privacy in most countries. Stigma is real, as are insurance risk algorithms.
Hell, in some countries people have been killed because of their medical history. Also, centralizing this data is very dangerous if this data falls into the wrong hands at a later date.
A prime example would be the registration of religion which happened in the Netherlands prior to world war 2. (for taxation reasons). Which resulted in a large number of victims during the holocaust in part because of this record keeping.
No, I'm advocating that a corporation or data leak does not get to decide when/how someone's HIV status is revealed.
> Would you be against a different entity hosting this data, or just Google?
I would be against most entities hosting this data, but Google has proved to be untrustworthy.
My ideal situation would be for my medical records to be encrypted and only usable with my explicit permission.
I may not be a good person. Or I can rationalize it enough because some people pay me to minimize any risk.
As a society we are getting better at talking about income. We hide _that_ because of a lack of class consciousness. We should absolutely be transparent with income (except when negotiating for a new salary).
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