Google Unveils New Health Database Details

I just found this important story. Sounds like more FACEBOOK-style "closed system" programming - targeting consumers with " disposable incomes".

Google still remains the champion of 'open source' program models.

Here is the transcript of an interview with Web / html creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He gives the impresssion that we are not completely fated to be victims of the chief global predators.

Web creator rejects net tracking
March 17, 2008
By Rory Cellan-Jones 
Technology correspondent, BBC News

Blogs and Wikis are really the tip of the iceberg. What I wanted the web to be was a place where we could have .. like a great big sandpit, where everybody could build things together, share their ideas, modify each other’s ideas, build new common understandings together. I think we’ve a long way to go before it’s that collaborative space.
One of the things we found early on, if you want people to collaborate over a design, then you have to be able to protect it from other people.
People will share their ideas in a limited group at first. And then they will be happy, once those ideas have been worked on for a bit, to share it with a larger group, then a larger group, then eventually, make it public. …working groups leading to public review.

Sites which respect the complexity of social relationships.
One list of friends rather than many different groups- you are actually involved with.

Young people can get on their bikes and go visit each other – older people can’t so it may turn out to be more important for seniors than for young people.

Just as there is a history of democracy inexorably spreading across the world, this connectivity and the urge to get hold of open information and to be open about information, both commercially and in government, –it seems to be an inexorable trend – there may be setbacks some times.

My feeling about humanity is in general is that it’s on a path toward greater openness. And I see that when a gov. that works to have a lot of control – to change that overnight would be crazy. And impossible.
Governments have to change their relationship with the people, slowly, so that the country remains stable, and the colony continues. So, we’ve seen countries go through major changes in ethos – it can be rocky.
My confident hope is that openness in the end will prevail and become ubiquitous, but it will be a while.

It’s been an open ethos in which the Internet grew up. The Internet spread first through the academic world in America, which is very connected, and also has a single language, so was a big monoculture of friendly people who allowed their computers to be used by other pairs of people to talk to each other. So it grew up as an extremely open peer culture. That affected the …

I much prefer to life in an open environment – it’s very important – a luxury in a way. Something we have to protect. And when it gets to privacy, we have to adjust and think about it very carefully.
Remainder of interview, about the future of Web Science, and is better presented below.


 
We asked Sir Tim to talk us through a map he has created as a way of depicting the growth of the internet and the web. It shows a few streams feeding into a small lake marked "internet", and from there into a bigger lake marked "World Wide Web". The web river then meanders through a green and fertile land before flowing into the "Sea of Interoperability."

But there is also a parched area on one side of the map described as "wasted arid lands". Among its features are the "Patent Peaks" and the "Proprietary Pass". And right at the centre of this gloomy landscape is something called the "Tor of Cism". For the life of me, I can't work out what that means, but I have a feeling Sir Tim might have been passing on a coded message.
See PDF of larger map: Sir_Tims_large_Map

What is web science?
March 12, 2008 by mystitech
Rory Cellan-Jones
In the august surroundings of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences, in a lecture theatre decorated with 18th Century paintings, a crowd gathered on Tuesday morning to celebrate the birth of a new science.
It’s called Web Science, and is an attempt to start understanding and exploring the ever growing phenomenon of the world wide web. Who better, then, to be the main speaker at today’s event than Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web?
Sir Tim began with a vivid picture of the way his baby has grown: “There are more pages out there on the web than there are neurons in your brain.” He went on to explain that he hadn’t been sure about using the word “science” in this new discipline because web science needed to reach out and include sociologists, philosophers and artists as well as the technical community.
“When we build the web,” he explained, “we choose a lot of the answers to philosophical questions. We are constructing a whole new world and we are writing down the rules. And a huge amount of the design involves the psychology of the user.” As an example he described how e-mail had taken off because users trusted each other to send only valuable material – but was now under threat because of spam: “The social assumptions have changed – people no longer assume that messages they are getting are messages they need.”
Sir Tim is working with the Southampton University computing science department, which along with Boston’s MIT, is leading the Web Science Research Initiative.
Professor Wendy Hall from Southampton (you can see an interview with her above) explained. “The web is the elephant in the room – it has transformed our lives, but we never see it. We feel the time has come to study it – to see its benefits and understand its possible dis-benefits.”
Her colleague Professor Nigel Shadbolt sketched out some early projects to illustrate the areas the new science might investigate. He showed a map of the blogosphere - “it’s a butterfly shape” - which illustrated the way communities coalesce around certain blogs. He showed why research into Wikipedia needed a sociological angle – what drives the users to write entries? – As well as technical analysis of the patterns of its growth.
Professor Shadbolt also gave some insights into the semantic web – a project which Tim Berners-Lee and the Southampton University academics have been pursuing for some time, to a degree of scepticism from other parts of the web community. He described plans to give every fact on the internet its own web address, with the aim of building a “data web” where every connection was more clear and more searchable. “So you could ask questions like show me all the tennis players in Moscow,” he explained.
Of course, scientists have been examining the web for some time. Now, though, they are trying to work out how they can guide its future growth. Tim Berners-Lee puts it like this: “The web is basically a web of people. Because it’s something we created, we have a duty to make it better.”
But the web has grown and prospered without any real guiding hand, despite the attempts of governments and businesses to bend it to their will. So can the web scientists really do anything to shape its future?

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Web creator rejects net tracking
March 17, 2008 by mystitech
By Rory Cellan-Jones 
Technology correspondent, BBC News
The creator of the web has said consumers need to be protected against systems which can track their activity on the internet.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee told BBC News he would change his internet provider if it introduced such a system.
Plans by leading internet providers to use Phorm, a company which tracks web activity to create personalised adverts, have sparked controversy.
Sir Tim said he did not want his ISP to track which websites he visited.
“I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that’s not going to get to my insurance company and I’m going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they’ve figured I’m looking at those books,” he said.
Sir Tim said his data and web history belonged to him.

     I think consumers rights in this are very important - we haven’t seen the results of these systems being used

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

He said: “It’s mine - you can’t have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I’m getting in return.”
Phorm has said its system offers security benefits which will warn users about potential phishing sites - websites which attempt to con users into handing over personal data.
The advertising system created by Phorm highlights a growing trend for online advertising tools - using personal data and web habits to target advertising.
Social network Facebook was widely criticised when it attempted to introduce an ad system, called Beacon, which leveraged people’s habits on and off the site in order to provide personal ads.
‘No strings’
The company was forced to give customers a universal opt out after negative coverage in the media.
Sir Tim added: “I myself feel that it is very important that my ISP supplies internet to my house like the water company supplies water to my house. It supplies connectivity with no strings attached. My ISP doesn’t control which websites I go to, it doesn’t monitor which websites I go to.”
Talk Talk has said its customers would have to opt in to use Phorm, while the two other companies which have signed up - BT and Virgin - are still considering both opt in or opt out options.
Sir Tim said he supported an opt-in system.
“I think consumers rights in this are very important. We haven’t seen the results of these systems being used.”

     We should look out for snags in the future - things can change so fast on the internet

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Privacy campaigners have questioned the legality of ISPs intercepting their customers’ web-surfing habits.
But the Home Office in the UK has drawn up guidance which suggests the ISPs will conform with the law if customers have given consent.
Sir Tim also said the spread of social networks like Facebook and MySpace was a good example of increasing involvement in the web. But he had a warning for young people about putting personal data on these sites.
“Imagine that everything you are typing is being read by the person you are applying to for your first job. Imagine that it’s all going to be seen by your parents and your grandparents and your grandchildren as well.”
But he said he had tried out several of the sites, and thought they might in the end be even more popular with the elderly than with young people.
Sir Tim was on a short visit to Britain from his base at MIT in Boston, during which he met government ministers, academics and major corporations, to promote a new subject, Web Science.
This is a multi-disciplinary effort to study the web and try to guide its future. Sir Tim explained that there were now more web pages than there are neurons in the human brain, yet the shape and growth of the web were still not properly understood.
“We should look out for snags in the future,” he said, pointing to the way email had been swamped by spam as an example of how things could go wrong. “Things can change so fast on the internet.”
But he promised that what web scientists would produce over the coming years “will blow our minds”