Hiding Genome Data Won't Protect Us, Experts Say
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Making the genetic codes of dangerous pathogens a secret will not save anyone from bioterrorism and may make the population vulnerable to attacks from Mother Nature, scientists said on Thursday.
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External developers and testers will see false values, keeping private data private.
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In 1980, I signed a deal with a company to market a product I was developing. The contract required me to turn over the source code, which I did. One day I went to a meeting at the office of the company, and there on the product manager's desk, right next to a door that opened to the outside, was a floppy labeled "Dave Winer's source code" in big letters.  If you own a Mac you may soon find out what that felt like. It's amazing to me that the tech blogosphere doesn't treat Apple's policy re broken hard disks as the huge gaping security hole that it is.  Think about it. We worry about bad people getting their hands on little pieces of data that, when added together, give them the power to be you in banking and credit transactions.  Think about what you would do if your laptop was stolen. Well, if you own a Mac and its hard disk goes bad, and you make the mistake of bringing it to Apple for service, you will turn over all that data to Apple. Not "may" or "might" but "will." What Apple in turn does with that data is none of your affair. They don't sign anything or offer any guarantees that they won't sell the disk to a data miner. Think it can't happen or that it's unlikely? I don't gain much comfort from your feeling of security. I've been writing about this issue since December 22. Usually when I write something critical of Apple, the results are mixed. Some people are supportive, but far more people attack. This time the ratio is very different. Almost everyone who has commented gets that there's a huge problem here. Can we solve this problem? Of course we can.  Some say that other vendors do this too. That gives me less comfort, not more. That means there's no escaping this crazy way of treating user's confidentiality. Ultimately it hurts the vendors because people can't use their computers for things the manufacturers say we can.  Further, it's got to be an issue for the banks, brokerage firms, credit agencies. If you are a newspaper and you employ reporters and they use a computer, how exactly are you guarding the confidentiality of your sources? If you're a confidential source, don't you have an interest when the reporter gives their computer manufacturer all their data to do with as they please? Imagine what you would do if it turned out there was a bug in a Netgear or Linksys router that allowed, under special circumstances, a mailicous person to gain access to the full content of your hard disk at any time. Would you have a problem with that? This is worse than Microsoft's neglect of malware that got me to stop using their computers. In that case it was Microsoft being neglegent. This time Apple itself is the cause of the problem. It's as if they planted a virus in their operating system that entitled them, under special circumstances, completely out of the user's control, to gain access to everything on your disk, with as much time as they want, with no way for you to prevent or even detect the intrusion.  See also: My letter to Steve Jobs.
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Worried about people accessing your  private information whenever you use a public computer? There  is a way to protect yourself: Devices as small as a keychain  allow you to use any computer without leaving a trail of  evidence.
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The fight against identity theft in the U.S. isn't going so well, according to new research released by Gartner Inc. And it doesn't look like it's going to get better anytime soon.
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Pressure mounts on records of innocents The government has responded to an e-petition on the burgeoning DNA database but rebuffed its main complaint that the world's largest criminological genetic store has been built "by stealth" and without Parliamentary and public consent.â¦
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The genetic profiles held by police for criminal investigations are not sophisticated enough to prevent false identifications, according to the father of DNA fingerprinting.
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Science & environment: Creators of malware are no longer script kiddies after kudos - they're criminals after your cash. Wendy M Grossman asks if protection can keep pace with them.
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Advances in genetic testing are straining the sacred bond of confidentiality between doctor and patient as physicians grapple with whether to keep private diagnoses that might also afflict patients' relatives.
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Opinion: Whether they realize it or not, many people leave sensitive information out in plain view on Web sites. But sooner or later, a Google search will dig it up.
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At the last day of the Web 2.0 Summit, attendees learned that having their genome mapped will set them back $300,000 and that&#160;Google&#39;s founders really stress over the prevention and extermination of evil.During a panel of former Google employees, they confirmed to moderator and conference chair John Battelle that, yes, Larry Page and Sergey Brin do factor heavily into business and technology decisions whether they will have evil consequences.WeatherBill CEO David Friedberg belonged to Google&#39;s Corporate Development team and, when negotiating acquisitions, it wasn&#39;t unheard of for either Page or Brin to ask hard questions about the deals if they sensed that the members of companies&#39; management teams had an evil streak, he said.Meanwhile, entrepreneur Bret Taylor, who developed products at Google for four years, said Page and Brin were excellent at steering product teams to think big while reminding them always keep in mind the question of evil.Earlier in the day, genetics maverick J. Craig Venter informed attendees that mapping a person&#39;s genome these days costs about $300,000, but that, as happened with calculators, the price will tumble over time. For instance, if you can wait a couple of years, the cost will probably be closer to $100,000. That&#39;s a bargain compared with the about $70 million that it cost to map Venter&#39;s genome.Venter&#39;s genome is posted on the Internet. He joked that there might come a day when singles on the dating scene will be able to do a Google search for potential mates&#39; genomes, especially if they might at some point consider becoming fruitful and multiplying.The son of a man who died of cardiac arrest at age 59 and of a woman who is still playing golf at 85, Venter has identified genes in his map both for heart disease and longevity. However, he estimates that scientists will need a critical mass of 10,000 human genomes in order to engage in the type of analysis that will lead to major, unequivocal insights about genetic traits.And in a rare display of corporate affection, representatives from Internet archrivals Google and Microsoft sat beside each other at a panel on online maps and exchanged pleasantries.The slightly surreal moment came about halfway through the a panel titled &quot;Edge: Mapping.&quot; Brian McClendon, engineering director and product manager of Google Earth, commended his Microsoft peer Erik Jorgensen, general manager of Live Search, for Microsoft&#39;s support of&#160;Google&#39;s Keyhole Markup Language (KML).KML is the language used to create data files for both Google Maps and its sister desktop application Google Earth. On Monday, Microsoft announced that its&#160;Live Search&#160;engine&#39;s local search component has gained support for KML, giving it access to the wealth of mapping data created with KML and available on the Web.Microsoft and Google can &quot;duke it out&quot; for customer acquisition, but &quot;the fight shouldn&#39;t be on file formats, so cooperating on this makes all the sense in the world,&quot; Jorgensen said during the mini lovefest.
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(InfoWorld) - Jeff Jonas, the chief scientist and distinguished engineer at IBM Corp.'s entity analytic solutions group, has developed a means of sharing corporate data without revealing what that data contains. This technology, called anonymization, effectively "shreds" information, making it possible for companies to share information about their customers with governments or other companies without giving away any personal data. Over time, Jonas believes companies will increasingly use anonymization to defend their data, and corporate well-being, from competitors and identity thieves. Jonas recently sat down with IDG News Service in Singapore to discuss anonymization and how protecting customer privacy will make companies more competitive. IDG News Service: How does anonymization work? Jeff Jonas: Normally, somebody with data encrypts it, and then they transfer it. Then, the recipient decrypts the data to use it. But while it's in transit -- in flight -- it's encrypted. Cryptographers have invented math that allows you to shred something, and then unshred it: encrypt it, and then decrypt it. Part of cryptography is something else that creates digital signatures. Smart math people have invented algorithms that are called one-way hashes. It looks like encryption because you put in data and what comes out is not readable to humans. But there's no way to take what came out and take the math and run it backwards, and get the input value. That's why I use the example of a pig and a sausage. If I give you the sausage and the grinder, you can't go backwards and make a pig. I just took advantage of something that someone else has made, and I just used it in a slightly different way to get a new result. IDGNS: In effect, the process of anonymization creates digital signatures of information that can be compared against other signatures for possible matches. At the same time, the signatures cannot be used to recreate the original data. Jonas: Normally, I have data and you have data and we want to figure out what our data means together. But I don't want to give you mine and you don't want to give me yours. This is why information sharing will fail: everyone wants to be the recipient. Sometimes a government may pass a law that says I, as a company, have to give you my data. Maybe you have a watch list, and you don't want me to see it. That's how I ended up creating this. I was getting ready to take my kids on a cruise. I made the reservations and then saw in a newspaper that there was a threat against Port Canaveral, Florida, from terrorist scuba divers. I was thinking, "Oh no, I'm taking my kids on a cruise." The U.S. government has this really cool, big list of bad guys. They don't send it to the cruise line, and the cruise line has all these reservations, and they don't send it all to the government. You could take 10 bad guys, they could just sneak across the border, use their real names and get on the cruise ship. That was the tension point. All of the work I had done prior allows an organization to share data with itself. What happens if you want to share data across two organizations and only find things in common? How would you do that? IDGNS: In the past, you've noted that personal information will get more valuable over time. Where is the incentive for companies to make anonymization of data a common practice? Jonas: Well, this is my theory. The pressures to an organization, every time it makes a copy of its data and sends it someplace else, the risk of someone stealing it grows. It's now twice as hard to protect, because you've just made a copy. You think its hard to protect this copy, but now you have two copies. Then you make another copy and send it to a database-marketing company -- now there are three copies. That creates real stress for an enterprise that's trying to manage their data. IDGNS: The incentive for companies to use anonymization then becomes protection of its own resources, rather than defending the privacy of customers? Jonas: Right. Corporations spend more time trying to be competitive than protecting privacy. If they spent all their time protecting privacy, they couldn't become more competitive. They would become nonexistent. I spend 40 percent of my time now working on privacy and civil liberties. You're right on the crux of this point: how do you create things that companies want to deploy, that make them more competitive and are good for privacy at the same time? Consumers traded privacy left and right, for convenience. IDGNS: And there's no way to get it back at this point. Jonas: Yeah. The toothpaste is out of the tube. Companies don't just say they want to spend money on privacy. They don't and I don't see that as a trend. You have to create something that can make them more competitive. Corporations are very risk averse. The notion of losing all their customer data, either to a competitor or identity thieves, and then having to make a public announcement that they lost all of their banking data, or all of their medical data, it can destroy their entire brand. If you can show them how to be more competitive, and at the same time reduce their risk exposure, then you are taking them on a journey, like in the case of anonymization, that is more responsible than not. It's a very new thing to be able to analyze data after it's been shredded. I am trying to teach the technique and I've heard other companies have announced they're going to create products like that, which is really good. There's a growing number of people using anonymization, and I think the wave is coming.
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People are less alike than scientists had thought when it comes to the billions of building blocks that make up each individual's DNA, according to a new analysis.
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GNUCitizen is describing an apparent vulnerability that could trick people into revealing personal data.
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Patients currently don't have any way to keep their personal information from being shared with third parties.
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Scientists are warning would-be slimmers to be careful about using 'DNA-diets' on the internet.
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No knocking off Blade Runner pleasure replicants German boffins believe they have developed a computer algorithm which can be used to hide encrypted "watermarks" within the DNA of living genetically-modified organisms. The procedure has been successful in simulated tests on live beer ingredients.â¦