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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 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! Its 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.
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Invasive surveillance: Are regulators ready to deal with Facebook’s ‘metaverse’?
November 6, 2021 — 5.00am
As Australian lawmakers struggle to regulate social media amid an onslaught of misinformation, conspiracies and extremist content, they are already facing the dawn of big tech’s latest push to make an even more invasive technology a part of everyday life.
Silicon Valley’s growing obsession with the metaverse – a nebulous concept grounded in the idea that the next generation of the internet will enable the real physical world and virtual worlds to seamlessly converge – is underpinned by an unspoken promise of mass data harvesting and new frontiers of highly targeted advertising.
The metaverse can be difficult to understand because it largely doesn’t exist yet, and there is no formal consensus on how a fully-fledged version of it should operate. But it is broadly understood to involve the use of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies, such as headsets, to bring to life a broad range of experiences – from socialising with friends to shopping or work conference calls – using immersive 3D imagery like holograms.
The gaming industry has been making inroads into the metaverse for years. But last week, Mark Zuckerberg staked a multibillion-dollar claim over its future development, declaring the metaverse to be the future of the internet and announcing Facebook would be renamed Meta to reflect its revised ambition to bring it to life.
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Why you can’t change people’s minds online
Social media echo chambers have been used to explain the election of Donald Trump and Brexit. But does exposure to opposing ideas broaden the mind?
Michelle Goldberg
Nov 5, 2021 – 2.38pm
In 2017, after the shock of Brexit and then Donald Trump’s election, Christopher Bail, a professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University, set out to study what would happen if you forced people out of their social media echo chambers.
Bail is the director of The Polarisation Lab, a team of social scientists, computer scientists and statisticians who study how technology amplifies political divisions. He and his colleagues came up with a simple experiment. As Bail writes in his recent book, Breaking the Social Media Prism, they recruited 1220 Twitter users who identified as either Democrats or Republicans, offering to pay them $US11 ($14.60) to follow a particular Twitter account for a month.
Although the participants didn’t know it, the Democrats were assigned to follow a bot account that retweeted messages from prominent Republican politicians and thinkers. The Republicans, in turn, followed a bot account that retweeted Democrats.
At the time, a lot of concern about the internet’s role in political polarisation revolved around what digital activist Eli Pariser once called filter bubbles, a term for the way an increasingly personalised internet traps people in self-reinforcing information silos.
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Privacy watchdog finds Clearview AI breached the privacy of Australians
Denham
Sadler
National Affairs Editor
3 November 2021
Facial recognition company Clearview AI breached Australian privacy rules through its “indiscriminate and automated” collection of the sensitive biometric information of Australians on a “large scale, for profit”, the privacy watchdog has found nearly two years after it started inquiries.
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) released its determination on Clearview AI on Wednesday, ordering the controversial facial recognition company to stop collecting any information on Australians and to delete all of the images it has already hoovered up.
The privacy watchdog also confirmed that a number of Australian police forces had utilised Clearview’s app and fed the system images of themselves, suspects and victims to test it, with this practice currently subject of a separate investigation that the OAIC is still finalising.
But the OAIC is unable to directly issue a fine to Clearview under its existing powers, and has not opted to apply to the courts for a fine. Under legislation unveiled by the government last week, the OAIC would be able to access more significant civil penalties, also through the court.
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Thursday, 04 November 2021 10:09
American firm Clearview AI found to have breached privacy of Australians
American facial recognition company Clearview AI has breached the privacy of Australians by scraping biometric information from the Internet and releasing it through a facial recognition tool, the information commissioner Angelene Falk says.
In a statement released on Wednesday, Falk, who is also the country's privacy commissioner, said this conclusion had been reached following a joint investigation between the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and the UK Information Commissioner’s Office.
Falk said Clearview has breached the Australian Privacy Act 1988 by:
- collecting Australians’ sensitive information without consent;
- collecting personal information by unfair means;
- not taking reasonable steps to notify individuals of the collection of personal information;
- not taking reasonable steps to ensure that personal information it disclosed was accurate, having regard to the purpose of disclosure; and
- not taking reasonable steps to implement practices, procedures and systems to ensure compliance with the Australian Privacy Principles.
The company was ordered to stop collecting data from Australians and to destroy any existing images and templates it had already collected.
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Australian regulator demands face-scanning firm Clearview AI delete photos
By Matt O'Brien
November 4, 2021 — 8.00am
An Australian privacy authority has ordered facial recognition company Clearview AI to stop scanning the faces of Australians and destroy the images and related data it has already collected.
It’s the latest challenge for the New York startup that has angered privacy advocates around the world over its practice of “scraping” photos from social media to identify people wanted by police and other government agencies.
Clearview has boasted it has a much larger collection of “more than 10 billion facial images, the largest known database of its kind” and that all are publicly accessible and legally obtained from online news sources, mugshot websites and social media.
Australian Information Commissioner and Privacy Commissioner Angelene Falk said that the company breached Australians’ privacy by pulling their personal data from the web and disclosing it through its facial recognition tool.
“The covert collection of this kind of sensitive information is unreasonably intrusive and unfair,” Falk said in a written statement. “It carries significant risk of harm to individuals, including vulnerable groups such as children and victims of crime.”
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Facial recognition and scraping technologies hit by privacy challenge
Tom Burton Government editor
Nov 3, 2021 – 6.17pm
The use of facial recognition and scraping technologies by police, security, financial start-ups and credit collection agencies is under question after controversial provider Clearview AI was found to have breached privacy laws multiple times and ordered to delete all images sourced from Australia.
The adverse finding against Clearview AI comes as Facebook announced it was closing down its decade-long facial recognition function and database, used by users to conveniently tag photos in their feed, amid widespread privacy concerns.
Clearview AI founder Hoan Ton-That is an Australian tech entrepreneur and former model who claims to be descended from the Vietnamese royal family.
Clearview AI is a US start-up founded by Australian tech entrepreneur and former model Hoan Ton-That. The firm has collected more than 3 billion images, many scraped from popular websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Venmo and LinkedIn.
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https://marketplace.service.gov.au/2/digital-marketplace/opportunities/17058
Australian Digital Health Agency
Senior Infrastructure Analyst
Opportunity ID 17058
Deadline for asking questions
Friday 5 November 2021 at 6pm (in Canberra)
Application closing date
Tuesday 9 November 2021 at 6pm (in Canberra)
Published Tuesday 2 November 2021
Category Support and Operations
Overview
• Maintain and deploy Australian Digital Health Agency’s system infrastructure to the highest possible standard. • Support the planning and implementation of infrastructure updates and patches • Monitor the uptime and reliability of installed infrastructure and ensure best practice backup procedures are in place. • Evaluation of new technologies and changes for availability and capacity management implications. • Undertake continuous performance and reliability reviews to improve quality of service and ensure adherence to SLA metrics • Liaise with Service Desk staff to resolve escalated issues, and perform ad-hoc requests. Liaise with the IT Infrastructure team to resolve escalated issues. • Update configuration management and support documentation at the time of the change • Where appropriate keeps up to date with legislative requirements through membership of industry organisations. • Ensures personal adherence to workplace health and safety requirements and either addresses or brings to management’s attention when others are in breach of these requirements. • Adhering to the Agency Values, Code of Conduct and policies. • Other duties as directed.
Estimated start date
1-12-2021
Location of work
Australian
Capital Territory
New South Wales
Queensland
Length of contract
7 months
Contract extensions
2 x 6 months
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4 November 2021
The mysterious goings on between Beamtree, Potential (x) and Health Roundtable
When Beamtree bought Potential (X) a couple of months ago, what it really bought was access to more than 25 years of longitudinal hospital data which was built by a not for profit called Health Roundtable.
If you have been following the rise and rise of publicly listed digital health stock Beamtree (aka PKS) recently, you will know that it is suddenly a pretty hot digital health stock.
From somewhat humble beginnings as a small AI start-up in 1998, what is now Beamtree (formerly Pacific Knowledge Systems) had been going nowhere slowly until late 2018 when it attracted the interest of investment group Bombora Holdings, which saw the potential in its health AI product Ripple Down and managed to buy and then list the group publicly in May 2019, raising about $20 million in capital as it went.
True to its Bombora-delineated strategy, PKS started acquiring synergistic assets in early 2020 with a full scrip offer for data analytics group Pavilion Health of about $8 million.
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https://www.afr.com/technology/in-the-age-of-ai-the-world-needs-a-kill-switch-20211102-p5956t
In the age of AI, the world needs a kill switch
Artificial intelligence will be everywhere but it’s still not clear if Siri and Alexa are safe to be around.
Maureen Dowd
Nov 3, 2021 – 8.00am
The first time I interviewed Eric Schmidt, a dozen years ago when he was the chief executive of Google, I had a simple question about the technology that has grown capable of spying on and monetising all our movements, opinions, relationships and tastes.
“Friend or foe?” I asked.
“We claim we’re friends,” Schmidt replied coolly.
Now that the former Google executive has a book out on The Age of AI, written with Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher, I wanted to ask him the same question about AI: “Friend or foe?”
“AI is imprecise, which means that it can be unreliable as a partner,” he said when we met at his Manhattan office. “It’s dynamic in the sense that it’s changing all the time. It’s emergent and does things that you don’t expect. And, most importantly, it’s capable of learning.
“It will be everywhere. What does an AI-enabled best friend look like, especially to a child? What does AI-enabled war look like? Does AI perceive aspects of reality that we don’t? Is it possible that AI will see things that humans cannot comprehend?”
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https://www.itnews.com.au/news/facebook-will-shut-down-facial-recognition-system-572106
Facebook will shut down facial recognition system
By Sheila Dang and Elizabeth Culliford on Nov 3, 2021 7:01AM
Citing growing societal concerns about the use of such technology.
Facebook said it is shutting down its facial recognition system, which automatically identifies users in photos and videos, citing growing societal concerns about the use of such technology.
"Regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use," Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Facebook, wrote in a blog post.
"Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate."
The removal of face recognition by the world's largest social media platform comes as the tech industry has faced a reckoning over the past few years over the ethics of using the technology.
Critics say facial recognition technology - which is popular among retailers, hospitals and other businesses for security purposes - could compromise privacy, target marginalised groups and normalise intrusive surveillance.
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https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=4d293c53-4478-4e00-a3d1-d169db0ec283
Australia: Draft Online Privacy Bill and Privacy Act review Discussion Paper foreshadow major changes to Australian privacy law
Blog Baker McKenzie Viewpoints
Baker McKenzie Anne-Marie Allgrove
Australia October 29 2021
It's a big week for privacy in Australia: the government has released an exposure draft of the Privacy Legislation Amendment (Enhancing Online Privacy and Other Measures) Bill 2021 (Online Privacy Bill), and a discussion paper (Discussion Paper) containing proposals for future reform of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Privacy Act).
Online Privacy Bill
The Online Privacy Bill would enable the creation of a binding online privacy code (Code) which will apply to social media services, data brokers, and certain large online platforms operating in Australia. Service providers and platform operators subject to the code will need to comply with strict new privacy requirements, including stronger protections for children on social media. Among other things, the Code will:
- require social media services subject to the code to take all reasonable steps to verify their users' age, obtain parental consent for collection of personal information of users under the age of 16, and give primary consideration to the best interests of the child when handling children's personal information
- prescribe how privacy policies, notices and consents are to be drafted and delivered
- detail when consent will be valid and, for sensitive information, when it needs to be renewed
- deal with the process for user requests to cease handling of personal information
The Online Privacy Bill will also introduce tougher penalties for breach of the Privacy Act, with courts being empowered to impose penalties of A$10million or more (in line with the Australian Consumer Law), and increased enforcement powers for Australia's privacy regulator, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC).
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https://www.seek.com.au/job/54647177?type=standout
General Counsel
Australian Digital Health Agency
Sydney CBD, Inner West & Eastern Suburbs
CEO & General Management General/Business Unit Manager
$227,359 to $277,176 total remuneration incl super
Full time
The Opportunity and Organisation – Australian Digital Health Agency
An exciting opportunity exists for a high performing Senior Executive to join the Australian Digital Health Agency to lead the Legal Services Branch.
The Australian Digital Health Agency (the Agency) is committed to the delivery of world-leading digital health capabilities. The Agency leads, coordinates, and innovates, in partnership with the health sector, across jurisdictions and with health consumers, to design and deliver seamless, safe, and secure digital health services for the better health for all Australians.
The Agency is maturing organisationally and pivoting towards the next wave of innovation in digital health to support the health of Australians into the future.
General Counsel – Strategic & Operational Leadership
Reporting to the Chief Operating Officer, you will lead and manage the Legal Services Branch and help steward the Agency to deliver on its national vision and strategic objectives and build a high performing team of legal professionals.
The role manages all requests for legal advice, including the application of the My Health Records Act 2012 and the Privacy Act 1988 in a dynamic environment. You have responsibility for the provision of strategic and operational delivery of legal services and staying abreast of legislative changes and risks across the government and health landscape that may affect the operations of the Agency and its application of the My Health Record Act 2012.
As General Counsel you will play a key role in major contract negotiations for the Agency and managing external legal advisory service contracts. The General Counsel also manages relationships and agreements with other government departments and agencies. The successful applicant will be a skilled communicator able to work with the CEO, members of the Executive and the Agency Board.
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Hunt likens voter ID plan to checking in with QR code
Tom McIlroy Political reporter
Oct 29, 2021 – 4.04pm
The Australian Electoral Commission will receive $5.6 million in extra funding to implement the Morrison government’s controversial voter ID laws, and voters will be able to show a digital version of their drivers’ licence at the ballot box.
Labor and the Greens have slammed the proposal to require voters to show photo ID as racist and discriminatory, warning the Coalition against interfering with the electoral system to suppress the votes from Indigenous Australians, homeless people and other marginalised groups.
But senior ministers, including Greg Hunt, have backed in the legislation introduced to Parliament this week, saying it will protect against fraudulent or double voting.
New funding for the AEC will be used for pre-election communication campaigns and community education designed to “inform voters about electoral participation with these new requirements”.
Critics of the plan say it is a solution in search of a problem.
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https://insightplus.mja.com.au/2021/41/victorian-information-sharing-bill-a-threat-to-privacy/
Victorian information sharing Bill a threat to privacy
Authored by David Vaile Juanita Fernando Shirley Prager Stephen Milgate Aniello Iannuzzi
THE Victorian Government’s Health Legislation Amendment (Information Sharing) Bill 2021 was rushed through its first parliamentary vote on 14 October 2021, raising many unanswered questions for patients and health care professionals in that state.
The purpose of the Bill, as stated in the preliminary section of the legislation is twofold:
- to establish a centralised electronic system to enable public hospitals and other specified health services to share specified patient health information for the purpose of providing medical treatment to patients; and
- to provide for public hospitals and other specified health services to collect and disclose specified patient health information to the Secretary for the purpose of establishing and maintaining the Electronic Patient Health Information Sharing System.
We believe the law will allow the Victorian Government to “establish a centralised electronic patient health information sharing system for participating health services” going back 5 years. The Bill mentions denominational hospitals, metropolitan hospitals, residential care services, and other specified services, including mental health, community health and ambulance. Where the grey area lies is in the Bill’s future potential to affect private practice, particularly in rural areas, where the duties of rural doctors in hospitals often overlap public and private systems.
We understand that every Victorian will be given a unique patient identification number, and that the Secretary can request information and identification on any patient from the participants, and enforce compliance, outlined in Sections 3 (b) and 4, of the Bill, with this request.
The data collected and linked by the proposed new Victorian Government medical records portal will be exposed to a large number of end users, such as government agencies and linked businesses across Australia, subject to the Secretary’s control. The data will contain each patient’s current and historical medical and health information.
The law blocks individuals’ ability to consent to or opt out of the process, to control access to their sensitive information, and to limit access to certain parties.
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https://www.ausdoc.com.au/news/tgas-plea-facebook-stop-clive-palmers-antivax-crusade
TGA's plea to Facebook: Stop Clive Palmer's anti-vax crusade
TGA boss Professor John Skerritt is urging the social media giant to remove claims that hundreds have died from COVID-19 vaccines
29th October 2021
The TGA has ramped up its efforts to stop Clive Palmer from falsely claiming hundreds have died after COVID-19 vaccination, writing directly to Facebook and YouTube to enlist their help.
Professor John Skerritt, the medicine watchdog’s head, wrote to the social media giants last week urging them to remove misleading claims that “undermines Australia’s vaccination program”.
On Facebook, they included in sponsored posts paid for by Mr Palmer's United Australia Party (UAP) that reached more than a million people.
“Extracts of information have been selectively taken from the Database of Adverse Event Notifications, which is hosted on the TGA website, and have been presented in such a way on social media that many could conclude that the vaccines have been responsible for several hundred deaths in Australia,” Professor Skerritt said.
“Rather than several hundred, as of 25 October 2021 nine deaths have been linked to vaccination by the TGA’s team of medical officers, supported by independent external specialist advice.”
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David.
