Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
David came to talk to us about MapReduce and how to deal with too
much data. Before we dive in to that, let's prime things with a thought
experiment.
Thought Experiment
How do we think about access to medical records and privacy?
On the one hand, there are very serious privacy issues when it comes
to health records—we don't want just anyone to be able to access
someone's medical history. On the other hand, certain kinds of access
can save lives.
By some estimates, one or two patients died per week in a certain
smallish town because of the lack of information flow between the
hospital's emergency room and the nearby mental health clinic. In
other words, if the records had been easier to match, they'd have been
able to save more lives. On the other hand, if it had been easy to match
records, other breaches of confidence might also have occurred. Of
course it's hard to know exactly how many lives are at stake, but it's
nontrivial.
This brings up some natural questions: What is the appropriate
amount of privacy in health? Who should have access to your medical
records and under what circumstances?
We can assume we think privacy is a generally good thing. For example,
to be an atheist is punishable by death in some places, so it's better to
be private about stuff in those conditions. But privacy takes lives too,
as we see from this story of emergency room deaths.
We can look to other examples, as well. There are many egregious
violations happening in law enforcement, where you have large data‐
bases of license plates, say, and people who have access can abuse that
information. Arguably, though, in this case it's a
human
problem, not
a technical problem.
It also can be posed as a philosophical problem: to what extent are we
allowed to make decisions on behalf of other people?
There's also a question of incentives. We might cure cancer faster with
more medical data, but we can't withhold the cure from people who
didn't share their data with us.
