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This weekly blog is to explore the news around the larger issues around Digital Health, data security, data privacy, AI / ML. technology, social media and any 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 were dated 6 December, 2018 and we have seen none since! It’s pretty sad!
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, and found interesting.
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https://www.croakey.org/twitter-meltdown-is-a-threat-to-health-in-many-ways-so-what-to-do/
Twitter meltdown is a threat to health in many ways. So what to do?
Melissa Sweet
Thursday, November 24, 2022
Introduction by Croakey: The upheaval at Twitter has profound, wide-ranging implications for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s health and wellbeing and for public health, emergency responses, public discourse, policy development and rural health, according to health leaders.
They told an online meeting hosted by Croakey this week that the concerns surrounding Twitter merit serious consideration and systematic responses by governments and policymakers, and also advocacy efforts by civil society and the health sector.
Participants shared diverse ways that Twitter has been used to promote public health, build communities and provide a platform for showcasing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander excellence in public health.
Melissa Sweet writes:
Elon Musk’s disruptive takeover of Twitter has sent shockwaves across the health and community sectors, where the platform has been a powerful tool for community-building, advocacy, engagement, research dissemination and connection.
About 40 people attended a snap online meeting convened by Croakey this week, which was chaired by Professor Megan Williams, who is Wiradjuri through her father’s family, Chair of Croakey Health Media and an academic at UTS Sydney.
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https://digitalhealth.org.au/blog/women-in-digital-health-applications-open-for-2023/
Women in Digital Health applications open for 2023
Nov 21, 2022 | AIDH news, Community Chats, Community of Practice, Digital Health, Women in Digital Health, Workforce
Applications are open until 20 January 2023 for the Institute’s Women in Digital Health (WiDH), leadership and professional development program.
Now in its second year, WiDH was developed to advance the digital health careers of women through immersive coaching and personalised mentoring experiences.
The 25 women accepted into the program will work with inspirational leaders, coaches and mentors from across the digital health community and join leadership retreats from February to August 2023. The targeted learning program includes six one-hour individual coaching sessions, in addition to numerous peer networking and learning opportunities.
Candidates are invited to register for an online information session from 10am – 11am AEDT Wednesday 30 November 2022.
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Hacker attacks are unlikely to slow down from here
By Tim Biggs
November 25, 2022 — 8.45am
The rate of damaging privacy breaches is unlikely to slow down over the next year, experts say, with exponential growth in personal information collection highlighting the need for greater awareness at businesses of the need to protect this data.
Jonathan Rubinsztein, chief executive of ASX-listed investigative analytics company Nuix, said the geopolitical climate combined with other recent developments such as the rise in remote working was powering a boom in data breaches in Australia and elsewhere.
“There’s no question that global political instability is a key driver, many of the attacks are suspected to be from state-sponsored actors,” he said.
“That, together with the post-COVID working-from-home arrangements and a proliferation of data, means the prize gets bigger and the ability to protect perimeters is getting more complicated.”
Rubinsztein said the Nuix analytics platform was used by both Medibank and Optus in the wake of their data breaches, but that companies should be integrating reviews of their data assets regularly rather than having to sort it out after an attack.
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Thursday, 24 November 2022 11:30
Hack Friday: Nearly 7 million Aussies have fallen victim to online shopping scams
Nearly 7 million Aussies have fallen victim to online shopping scams, it was revealed today as almost 11 million Australian shoppers prepare to embark on the biggest bargain hunts of the year.
Research commissioned by cybersecurity company NordVPN reveals that 26% of Australians have been scammed while shopping online — equivalent to seven million people.
“With Black Friday less than a week away, cyber scammers have their sights on the four in five Australians who might take part in the event — 40.8% of Austrlia’s shoppers say they’ll head online for Cyber Monday, Black Friday or the Christmas sales, with a further 34.3% still to decide,”NordVPN notes.
“The task of online criminals is being made easier by the millions of Australian consumers prepared to offer up a treasure trove of personal information in exchange for an extra markdown or freebie — and those who have already been scammed are at the front of the queue.
“Of the three in ten people who have previously experienced a scam, many admit they’d still be prepared to hand over a catalogue of bizarrely irrelevant information to get a big discount or freebie.
“One in ten (10.8%) would hand over their credit card details, 4.6% would give their tax file number and 8.1% would reveal where they worked. A further 8.1% would even reveal their children’s names for the chance to bag an extra bargain.
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Wednesday, 23 November 2022 23:14
NordVPN research finds websites have 48 trackers on average, social media sites have 160
NordVPN research finds websites follow their visitors with 48 trackers per site on average, with social media websites at 160 trackers on average.
In fact, the number of trackers by social media websites is so high - for collecting and monetising user data - that it completely skews the data; the next highest category, health websites, comes in at 46 trackers on average. In third place are digital media sites with an average of 28 trackers per site.
Coming in last place is Government websites with an average of a single tracker per site, and in second-last place are porn websites with an average of four trackers.
The bulk of trackers are third parties - that is, they are not from the user (obviously), but are not created or owned by the website operator itself. Instead, 30% of these third-party trackers belong to Google, 11% to Facebook and maybe surprisingly, 7% to Adobe. This data is collected and used in marketing.
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https://www.itnews.com.au/news/senate-committee-stamps-privacy-breach-penalties-588170
Senate committee stamps privacy breach penalties
By Richard Chirgwin on Nov 23, 2022 10:46AM
Recommends better definition of key terms.
A senate committee has recommended passage of law changes that would substantially increase the penalties for large or repeated privacy breaches, with only minor revisions to the draft legislation.
The committee’s report [pdf] asks that the government define the bill’s terms “serious" and "repeated" privact interference; and that the Attorney General’s department add one provision in the bill to its ongoing review of the Privacy Act.
The committee’s report means that the most contentious provisions in the bill, the penalties it imposes, are likely to pass into law.
These penalties could be up to $50 million, or three times the value of the benefit obtained by a privacy breach, or 30 percent of the company’s turnover during the breach period.
The proposed fines were strongly resisted by banks and other organisations, particularly the latter two provisions.
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https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=be70ce1c-684a-4f9c-9e78-b7c110cad143
Momentum has shifted and privacy reform is on the way
Governance Institute of Australia - Charles Dane
Australia November 17 2022
Ask anyone on the street and it’s certain they will either be aware of the recent spate of high-profile cyber-attacks or be a victim of one. I wrote about the attacks in the last News Update.
There’s no denying, we live in a rapidly evolving data landscape, and our current privacy regulations are not keeping pace. In the Australian Privacy Commissioner’s 2020 survey, 83% of Australians said they’d like the government to do more to protect the privacy of their data.
It’s now November 2022, and no regulations have changed.
We need a Privacy Act that is fit for purpose for the digital age. It’s almost unthinkable that the current privacy regulations were designed in 1988.
Collectors of our data need to be aware of the serious risks posed by storing unnecessary but highly sensitive data. What is needed are new regulations that minimise the amount and types of data extracted for commercial purposes as well as a new regulator to vigorously enforce these regulations.
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FTX collapse sends pain through local crypto and start-up sectors
3:30PM November 20, 2022
The collapse of global cryptocurrency platform FTX is beginning to impact local projects and start-ups, which are reporting steep revenue drops in the last week.
The local tech industry was already one of the worst hit by lay-offs this year, and those inside the sector are pessimistic about prospects in the wake of the failure of FTX, the collapse of which has provided an unprecedented view into how poorly it was managed.
At least one local crypto exchange with exposure to FTX, Digital Surge, was forced to suspend withdrawals last week, while almost 30,000 local FTX users remain locked out of their accounts.
Joan Westenberg, who runs Web3 content and publishing agency Studio Self, said she has already lost 80 per cent of revenue as a direct result of the FTX collapse. She said that as the scope and scale of the FTX fallout was revealed, she proactively reached out to the Web3 founders and tech platform she works with and gave them the option to end their marketing and communications contracts without penalty.
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https://medicalrepublic.com.au/ai-and-graph-technology-to-improve-patient-care/81680
21 November 2022
AI and graph technology to improve patient care
The ability to navigate large volumes of unstructured data is a step toward better outcomes, efficiencies, and opportunities in medical research.
The increasing digitisation of healthcare and medical research, from telemedicine to electronic health records, is creating exciting opportunities to use data to drive new efficiencies.
Technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), digital twin and graph data science are generating insights that enable better prevention, more accurate diagnoses, more effective patient treatments and solve complicated healthcare and life sciences problems.
The massive volume of data that is generated and used in today’s digital economy requires technology that can effectively solve modern data challenges. Graph technology, which works differently from traditional databases, can compare multiple datasets and contexts since the data is stored as nodes and links, which helps structure and identify the relationships between entities.
Improving the patient’s journey
The healthcare sector is inundated with large volumes of unstructured data which can be overwhelming for many healthcare providers and difficult to analyse and make sense of.
In one case, a large US health insurance company wanted to use patient data to improve health and outcomes. With 3.5 million members, it had amassed a huge amount of data, including claims, explanations of diagnoses and procedure codes, and it saw opportunities to generate insights from this. By looking at people who managed chronic conditions well, and how they did this, they could share these insights with other members.
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https://www.afr.com/technology/why-ftx-is-adding-up-to-a-crypto-crunch-point-20221117-p5bz4v
Why FTX is adding up to a crypto crunch point
Already suffering from a “tech bro” image problem, FTX has shown the industry in a worse light than even the sceptics imagined.
Jessica Sier Journalist
Nov 18, 2022 – 4.27pm
A 39-year-old man we will call Blake phoned this week in desperation. He wanted to know if there was any more information about the administration of FTX Australia.
Calling from the Gold Coast, he was close to tears. An electrician by day, Blake enjoyed numbers (and money) and had been teaching himself to trade derivatives on the FTX platform over the past 18 months.
But last weekend, he logged into FTX to discover his account was frozen. He couldn’t move his funds, worth about $45,000, anywhere. He figured it was a glitch and waited for FTX to start working again. It didn’t, and next time he logged in his balance read $0.
“My insides went icy,” Blake said. “I was clicking and clicking and nothing was happening. I knew I had $45,000 sitting there but I couldn’t do anything with it. Trust me, I’ve made enough bad trades over the last year to know when it’s me that has f---ed up. This was not me f---ing up.”
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How to avoid joining Optus and Medibank on the cybersecurity walk of shame
John Davidson Columnist
Nov 17, 2022 – 3.40pm
Another day, another revelation that Australian companies are chronically underinvesting in cybersecurity.
Today, it’s Medibank revealing that the damage wrought by its recent cyberattack is worse than it had previously stated, which in turn was far worse than Medibank’s prior update, which in turn was dramatically worse than Medibank’s first revelation on October 13 that it had suffered a cyberattack but that there was “no evidence that any sensitive data, including customer data, has been accessed”.
Who knows what tomorrow will bring? Does Medibank even have any data left that it’s yet to realise was exposed in the data breach?
Indeed, who knows what the next seven minutes will bring? That’s how often the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) receives a report of another cybercrime attack nowadays, now that (as the ACSC says) Russian crime gangs appear to be working with the Russian state to help fund the war in Ukraine.
What we do know is that the chronic underinvestment in cybersecurity has become an acute threat to Australian businesses and institutions.
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David.
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