Yesterday, Google launched their newest product, Google Health, a web-based tool that lets you track your medical conditions, history and medications all in one place. Some medical providers can even connect to Google Health, so you can import your complete health history as easily as you can invite all of your MSN contacts to sign up for Gmail.

Scary, right? Of course Google promises that they will keep your information “safe and secure,” but safe and secure from whom? The privacy policy mentions that they will use your personal health data in ways not clearly defined:

Google will use aggregate data to publish trend statistics and associations. For example, Google might publish trend data similar to what is published in Google Trends.

They might. Or they might not. This vague “policy” doesn’t inspire confidence. But it gets worse:

None of this data can be used to personally identify an individual.

We know this isn’t true, as we’ve already seen how ostensibly anonymized data can be used, with some detective work, to reveal identities. And if no one has ever captured and published this particular data before, how can we be certain that individuals can’t be identified with it? More importantly, does lumping my information in with others’ and then publishing it on the web qualify as keeping my health records “safe and secure”? Obviously, Google and I disagree on this point. But we have already transitioned into a world where Gmail mines our emails, and Mint monitors our personal finances, so why not do the same with medical records?

An efficient, secure tool for managing one’s own health information would be an enormous asset. I just don’t think that a web-based, hosted solution is in the individual’s best interest. Convenience doesn’t always have to come at the expense of relinquishing control of our private data.

Also see: NY Times story

Frame That Spam! Data-Crunching Artists Transform the World of Information, an interactive piece on wired.com, showcases several beautiful examples of art generated from data. The usual crew are well-represented — Aaron Koblin, Casey Reas — plus some names that were new to me.

Many of the pieces are more artsy and less “design-y” than the work we do at DMI, simply because the visualizations are intended to be more emotional than practical. I define practical as interpretable, meaning the data values could be extracted from the visual elements. A bar chart is easily interpretable: the height of each bar (y) represents a number, and its horizontal position (x) reflects another value (time or some other grouping). Waves and waves of technicolor text, in contrast, may be beautiful and evoke a general sense of the data involved, but is probably not easily interpreted, except by the algorithm that drew it.

I keep struggling with this artificial distinction between art and design, wondering why emotional pieces are labeled art, while more ostensibly functional pieces are considered design. Doesn’t good design evoke an emotional response? And can’t artwork be functional, too? I usually identify more as a designer than an artist, but I am beginning to question the usefulness of both of those terms. Traditionally, art was more purely expressive, and design more data-driven, but now that we have “fine artists” doing intensively data-driven work, the distinction is starting to feel outdated.

Image credit: Detail from Textour by Tim Walter.

I’ve officially submitted my Search Explorer project to Rhizome’s 2009 commissions process! Watch the demo, and if you like what you see, I’d appreciate your vote!

My AOL data project has gotten me both interested in and terribly frustrated with the challenges of working with massive amounts of data. Data manipulation and optimization is not my bag, but I’m afraid it’s going to have to be soon. In any case, I thought I’d share some of the great resources I’ve found.

Interesting Datasets

I would love to do projects with each of these.

• AOL Search Data
• Enron Company Emails
• The Entire Contents of Wikipedia
• Hillary Clinton’s Schedules as First Lady
• Public Transit Data Feeds
• World Database of Happiness

Compilations of Publicly Accessible Data

These sites all point to datasets that you can download and incorporate into your projects.

• Pages tagged with “publicdata” on del.icio.us
  Subscribe to the feed on this page to keep an eye on what interesting stuff others find.

• A Meta-index of Data Sets
  A great starting point, with more helpful links than this post.

• Digitized Historical Collections from the Library of Congress
  The central starting point for all records at the Library accessible via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol. I’m not 100% sure what that means, but it sounds like something I could use down the line.

• Infochimps
  A newly launched site with lots of potential to grow into something interesting.

• Copyright Free and Public Domain Media Sources
  Points mostly to photographs and other images, and mostly older ones, at that. Thanks, Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.