Our medical history data is about as private as it’s possible to get, so when someone as high profile as Google founder Larry Page calls for all of this to be made public, the issue deserves our attention.

Page made the suggestion during an appearance at the TED Conference, saying “Wouldn’t it be amazing to have anonymous medical records available to all research doctors?,” adding that to do so could potentially save thousands and thousands of people’s lives, reports TechCrunch.

From a doctors’ perspective it’s an obvious thing to do. By having everybody’s medical records in public, researchers would be able to spot trends to do with things like the spread of disease or the side-effects of drugs far more easily. The larger the dataset, the easier it is to spot these trends – such as in the case of the deadly side-effects of an anti-inflammatory drug called Rofecoxib, which caused between 88,000 and 140,000 cases of serious heart disease before it was finally withdrawn, according to Wikipedia.

Page claims that opening up our public health records would lead to all kinds of benefits, such as looking for unknown side-effects, carrying out original research and giving patients personalized health recommendations based on factors such as their age, weight, ethnicity, location, behavior and so on. As well as the thousands of lives that could be saved, millions more would undoubtedly be improved.

But the cost of doing so would almost certainly be people’s privacy. In this day and age, technology is simply too powerful to guarantee that anyone can remain anonymous. TechCrunch cites the example of a research paper written by John Wilbanks of Sage Bionetworks, an organization that calls for greater medical transparency. In the paper, researchers carried out an experiment aimed at identifying around 1,000 people whose medical records were stored on an anonymous database, and were able to guess the identity of about 50 of them, by cross-referencing it with the DNA of their relatives.

It’s getting easier by the day to identify people based on their public and private data, and unfortunately the medical data that researchers need would be a dead-giveaway to our identities – we’re talking about data like people’s age, race, height, weight, sex; where they live; and also their jobs. Crunch all this data together, scrape a few social media sites like Facebook and Google+, and it probably wouldn’t be all that difficult to find out who the records belong too.

One day it’s going to come down to the question: Do we choose medical breakthroughs or privacy?

Granted, most people would probably be willing to give up their privacy to save lives if they knew there wouldn’t be any repercussions, but when you consider that this data can also be used against you – by malicious persons, by advertisers, by insurance companies, law enforcement and so on – you might not be quite so keen after all.

photo credit: · · · — — — · · · via photopin cc