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This weekly blog is to explore the larger issues around Digital Health, data security, data privacy, AI / ML. technology and related matters.
I will also try to highlight ADHA Propaganda when I come upon it.
Just so we keep count, the latest Notes from the ADHA Board are dated 6 December, 2018! Secrecy unconstrained! This is really the behaviour of a federal public agency gone rogue – and it just goes on! When you read this it will be well over 12 months of radio silence, and better still the CEO, COO and the Chief of Staff have also gone. I wonder will things improve now?
Note: Appearance here is not to suggest I see any credibility or value in what follows. I will leave it to the reader to decide what is worthwhile and what is not! The point is to let people know what is being said / published that I have come upon.
Oh, and Happy New Year!
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Inside Australia's race to build a viable quantum computer
Quantum computing promises to change everything about the way we live, and two Australian universities are taking very different paths in search of the elusive prize.
John Davidson Columnist
Dec 27, 2019 — 12.07am
On an overcast morning midway through last decade, then Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, stood at a podium in the Sydney suburb of Kensington, claiming to be at the very "cutting edge of the new age of computing".
The podium stood in front of a $25 million extension that had just been added to the Centre for Quantum Computation at the University of NSW, where scientists led by an English physicist who would go on to become the Australian of the Year, Professor Michelle Simmons, were trying to build a world-beating quantum computer.
"You’re not just doing great work, Michelle, you're doing the best work in the world," the Prime Minister enthused. “You're not just . . . determining the direction of computing for Australia, you are leading the world.”
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Human Rights Commission wants privacy laws adjusted for an AI future
It is one of 29 proposals that the commission has proposed as it seeks to address the impact of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, will have on human rights.
By Aimee Chanthadavong | December 17, 2019 -- 02:55 GMT (13:55 AEDT) | Topic: Innovation
The Australian Human Rights Commission has called on the Australian government to modernise privacy and human rights laws to take into account the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) as one of 29 proposals put forward in its Human Rights and Technology discussion paper.
"We need to apply the foundational principles of our democracy, such as accountability and the rule of law, more effectively to the use and development of AI," Human Rights commissioner Edward Santow wrote in his foreword in the discussion paper [PDF].
"Where there are problematic gaps in the law, we propose targeted reform. We focus most on areas where the risk of harm is particularly high. For example, the use of facial recognition warrants a regulatory response that addresses legitimate community concern about our privacy and other rights.
"Government should lead the way."
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The world is reeling from a Zucker punch
Ten years ago, the pace of technology, particularly in social media, was a trickle; now it’s a toxic torrent.
By DAVID SWAN
December 27, 2019
No one was prepared for just how damaging Facebook, and social media more broadly, would become.
The 2010s will likely be remembered most for the tech giants’ outsized influence on our lives and our collective inability to rein them in. Social media has disrupted democracy, dumbed down discourse and come at a cost to civil society that we can’t even yet fully understand.
The tech titans’ mysterious algorithms — of which we know virtually nothing — morphed across the decade from mere recommendation engines to the mastermind of what we see and read every day. In contrast to a newspaper editor or a TV news director selecting what stories were most important for people to read — even if they wouldn’t necessarily be popular — a non-human algorithm instead would pick what was most likely to gain clicks, “likes” and engagement.
What started as platforms promoting connectivity evolved into damaging tools for division and dumbed down debate over the past decade, says tech reporter David Swan.
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California gets tough on data privacy breaches
History does not repeat but sometimes it rhymes. So, it seems, do efforts to protect netizens’ privacy. The European Union led the world with its General Data Protection Regulation, which came into force in May 2018. That law shook up internet giants and global advertising firms, both of which had previously used — and at times abused — consumer data with little oversight.
On December 11 India’s government introduced a bill that would force firms to handle data only with consumer consent and give the authorities sweeping access to them. The same day Prime Minister Scott Morrison promised a review of privacy laws and said the competition authority will monitor how advertising is done on digital platforms.
But the most important piece of legislation rhyming with GDPR right now is the California Consumer Privacy Act, which comes into force on January 1. To online businesses, it jars.
The Californian law copies some of the GDPR’s provisions. It gives consumers the right to know what online information is collected about them and how it is used, permits them to demand that their data be destroyed and to sue companies for data breaches.
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Ethical machine learning: the Australian government’s official AI ethics framework
On 7 November 2019, the Australian Federal Government’s Minister for Industry, Innovation, and Science, Karen Andrews, announced the Australian government’s official AI ethics framework.
This is a voluntary set of parameters for businesses and organisations when designing, developing, integrating, or otherwise using artificial intelligence.
The framework reduces to eight principles, and we replicate below the summary from the Department of Industry, Innovation, and Science’s website:
Principles at a glance
- Human, social and environmental wellbeing: Throughout their lifecycle, AI systems should benefit individuals, society and the environment.
- Human-centred values: Throughout their lifecycle, AI systems should respect human rights, diversity, and the autonomy of individuals.
- Fairness: Throughout their lifecycle, AI systems should be inclusive and accessible, and should not involve or result in unfair discrimination against individuals, communities or groups.
- Privacy protection and security: Throughout their lifecycle, AI systems should respect and uphold privacy rights and data protection, and ensure the security of data.
- Reliability and safety: Throughout their lifecycle, AI systems should reliably operate in accordance with their intended purpose.
- Transparency and explainability: There should be transparency and responsible disclosure to ensure people know when they are being significantly impacted by an AI system, and can find out when an AI system is engaging with them.
- Contestability: When an AI system significantly impacts a person, community, group or environment, there should be a timely process to allow people to challenge the use or output of the AI system.
- Accountability: Those responsible for the different phases of the AI system lifecycle should be identifiable and accountable for the outcomes of the AI systems, and human oversight of AI systems should be enabled.
More questions are raised by the framework than answered. We deal with some immediately obvious issues below.
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Biometrics critical to countering terror threats
The incoming government brief from the Department of Home Affairs reveals the organisation’s increasing reliance on biometric data to detect and respond to what it calls “threats within the immigration program”.
The department uses biometrics collected from visa applications in Australia and 46 other countries to detect “persons of concern”.
People applying for a visa to Australia from those countries will have a photo of their face taken and their fingertips recorded on a digital finger scanner.
The millions of biometrics collected are checked against existing data holdings and other databases run by Australia’s M5 immigration partners, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and the US.
The brief said “intelligence sharing with law-enforcement agencies and Five Eyes partners had strengthened” since the establishment of the Department of Home Affairs.
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ACCC prods tech titans on media content deal
Facebook and Google have been urged to reach an agreement quickly and in “good faith” with traditional media companies or face intervention by the competition watchdog, including imposition of a mandatory code.
A letter from Australian Competition & Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims to the local chief executives of Google and Facebook, obtained by The Australian, told the US tech giants to advise the ACCC by the end of January “the broad subjects proposed for negotiation, the potential format of commitments so they are enforceable”.
The letter, which mandates a detailed timeline for negotiations including a full draft agreement for the ACCC’s perusal by October, follows the Morrison government’s endorsement of a raft of ACCC recommendations to rein in the tech giants’ market power in local digital markets, including a voluntary code.
“It will be important to progress negotiations in good faith and as expeditiously as possible in order to meet these deadlines, noting that the government has indicated it will consider options, including imposing a mandatory bargaining code, if a suitable outcome is not reached within the expected timeframe,” it said.
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Police using facial recognition cameras at Victoria's busiest stations
By Farrah Tomazin
December 25, 2019 — 11.45pm
Victoria Police is quietly using facial recognition technology to identify criminal suspects at 85 of the state's busiest police stations.
A month after body-worn cameras came under the spotlight, police figures reveal that another form of camera technology known as iFace has been rolled out at key stations.
The system uses biometric software to identify suspects by comparing still images against Victoria Police’s mugshot database of known offenders.
But secrecy surrounds the network, its use and how many times people have been mistakenly flagged as potential criminals. Facial recognition technology has proved significantly inaccurate in overseas jurisdictions.
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Advance Care Planning and My Health Record Community Workshop
Are you good to go?
Thursday 6 February 2020
10:00 AM - 2:00 PM
You are invited to a FREE interactive community workshop on advance care planning and My Health Record.
Comment – sick tag line above….ich!
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2019 CEO survey: Data in driver’s seat for top execs
ACCC chief Rod Sims will increasingly use control of data as a key metric in deciding whether a merger breaches competition rules — and this year’s business leader survey shows data use has gone from theory to fact.
The survey of 73 business leaders shows increased use of artificial intelligence, with Magellan’s Hamish Douglass saying: “Magellan uses data science and machine learning to improve many processes in our business.”
CBA’s Matt Comyn said the bank was “using analytics to help our 7 million digitally active customers better understand and manage their finances, or to connect them with a range of benefits they may be entitled to.”
QBE’s Pat Regan said: “Things like artificial intelligence and robotics are helping speed up claims-handling and strengthen our fraud detection capabilities, for example. We’re using data better and exploring more ways that we can better capture that to deliver more tailored customer solutions.”
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Media Release: My Health Record sees a 62 per cent increase in general practitioners viewing documents
Created on Monday, 23 December 2019 ADHA Propaganda
According to data released by the Australian Digital Health Agency (the Agency), general practices increasingly lead the way in using My Health Record, with usage (viewing and uploading) rising substantially since March 2019.
In data released in December as part of a refreshed My Health Record statistics dashboard, general practices averaged around 200,000 My Health Record views per month throughout September and October, a 62 per cent increase since March this year.
- Since March, monthly cross-organisation views have increased by 140 per cent.
- General practices are viewing the most documents uploaded by other healthcare providers, and the documents they upload are most frequently viewed by other healthcare providers (including other general practices).
- 90 per cent cent of general practices are registered for My Health Record, with 71 per cent using the system as at November 2019.
- General practices are one of the leading healthcare provider groups in both registration and usage, along with pharmacies (90 per cent registered and 69 per cent using) and public hospitals (94 per cent of beds registered).
- General practices also upload between 2 and 3 million documents to the system every month.
Dr Harry Nespolon, President of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, said general practitioners may be more inclined to use My Health Record because of the nature of their work.
“Many general practitioners are treating patients with complex or chronic conditions, so they need to be able to make decisions that are informed by a wider view of a patient’s health.
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Comments more than welcome!
David.
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