Technology Futures

Google has announced its long promised Google Health service, which stores your medical and drug records on Google servers. You get to set your own userid and password, and Google makes a big deal about the high level of security on their servers. But I don't think the biggest privacy concern is from hackers--I think Google CAN keep the servers secure.

What I worry about is Google simply nosing through everyone's health records, looking for data that can be sold, repackaged, or re-purposed for advertisers. Yes, the company has a security and privacy policy, but they are also free to change it anytime they like, after many of us have given them all our health information. The service is not bound by HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) rules, which would require Google to notify you, if for example, someone or some entity tried to subpoena your health records. "Free health record storage," however convenient it may be, is not free; the price one pays is giving up more privacy.

I recently had to do some research work and had to visit about a dozen Web community and higher ed Web sites. The higher ed sites were community colleges and small four year colleges. Uniformly, all the sites were quite bad. Basic information like street addresses and phone number were either missing or hard to find. Different parts of the sites looked different and had different navigation buttons in different locations. Many pages with the right titles lacked useful information in the body of the page.

The community sites often had very little information about the community. Many of them simply had a few links to other sites, like local government and tourism. So it was actually quite difficult to learn anything useful about the communities from the community Web site.

Search engines index and rate sites based on the kind and type of information on the site, and ignore images. While good graphic design is important for the user experience, it is not enough. Web sites today are a primary marketing tool for organizations and communities, and yet, based on my experience, many well-funded organizations and communities spend little or nothing on what could be their best marketing tool. Communities that will quickly spend tens of thousands of dollars on color brochures are reluctant to spend a few thousand dollars on a high quality Web site that has a worldwide reach.

Most early business relocation research is now done via the Web, and if your community does not have a cluster of well-designed sites--community portal, K12 schools, higher ed, tourism, economic development, community groups--your business attraction efforts may falter.

"Whaling" is a new form of phishing attacks. It is called whaling because the spam emails are carefully targeted towards big fish, or whales. Spammers have been sending carefully crafted emails that look like an official U.S. Federal Court sub poena. Clicking on the link embedded in the email secretly installs a keystroke logger on your computer which then sends userids, passwords, and credit card numbers to the spammer.

We actually got one of those sub poenas about two weeks ago, and it certainly looked official. But sub poenas are usually delivered in person, and so after looking closely at the email and some of the links, we quickly determined it was spam.

Graham Richards, the former Mayor of Ft. Wayne, Indiana, spoke at the Broadband Properties Summit about why Ft. Wayne pushed fiber to the home. Some of the services and benefits included:

A green affordable housing initiative cut monthly energy costs for lower income families, and the broadband network was used to monitor energy use.

The network enabled live video monitoring of latchkey children whose parents had to work. Parents could have high quality video chats with their children as soon as they arrived home in the afternoon.

Local schools were able to offer enhanced distance learning opportunities to their students, including afternoon and weekend mentoring with tutors (enabled by the fiber network).

Their vision was fiber everywhere: a community broadband network dedicated to equality of opportunity and universal access.

They began a pilot initiative to have the city use hybrid plug in vehicles to reduce fuel and transportation costs for city workers.

They set a goal of saving 5% of the city budget through IT/broadband and green strategies--helping to conserve taxpayers dollars.

While Richards was mayor, he was able to turn the economic growth of the city from a deep loss of jobs to a dramatic turnaround in jobs creation and new businesses, and he attributed it to setting a vision, sticking to it, and broadband.