Google Health

HIV Positive? May we suggest this great cocktail, which will extend your life two weeks longer than the competition can!!
I couldn't help it, but this sort of imaginary ad was my first response to Google's new health service. I'm a huge fan of Google, and half my life is stored on their servers - be it all my business emails, my calendar, all my notes, some of my documents, and even files. I'm very small on big brother conspiracy theories, and I think anyone can get your information unless you make extreme-almost-unreasonable steps to protect it. I even use clipperz for storing most of my passwords "online" (read the service description - it's not that simple).
And still, after I logged in, and the site suggested it would automatically access my records in my doctor's clinic, just like facebook offers to access my gmail account to look for friends - that really did make me feel uncomfortable.
When you come to think of it, since a lot of health services in the country have all your information exposed online for your convenience, Google can be no different. In fact, I believe that the folks in Google, on average, are better programmers than the rest of us, and so your information there is likely more protected than your information on your health-service provider's website (if you've had the luxury of working with an IT department of some health service providers, you may actually be getting a weird itch right about now). But, giving access to your medical records to an organization with a business model that relies for the most part on being able to provide personalized ad-serving, still somehow gives me the chills.

Anyways, who cares what I think. Enjoy the service.