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If you follow Jeff Jarvis on Twitter or read his blog, you know (maybe more than you wanted to) about his fight against prostate cancer. I’ve mostly paid attention to what he’s written about technology and journalism, but check out this excerpt from his post, The German privacy paradox:

I prefer to turn the question around now and look at the benefits of publicness that we lose when we make something unnecessarily private. I’ve said that revealing my prostate here brought me great value: support, links to sources of information, incredibly candid and helpful previews from patients who’ve gone before, and the opportunity to spur others to check for the disease. Without revealing my cancer in public, I’d have received none of that benefit. I also argue in WWGD? that there’s value in the aggregation of our knowledge: if we all chronicled what we were doing 24 hours before the onset of my other condition, heart arrhythmia, would doctors find new patterns? If we all shared and could analyze our repair records for our Toyotas, would we surface dangerous flaws earlier? Not revealing such data may indeed someday be seen as antisocial.

The first time I met Gilles Frydman, I asked him about ACOR‘s privacy policy. He shrugged and smiled, “Our policy is that you have no privacy.” Social sharing on the ACOR listserves is expected, if not required. That prepared me for meeting Ben & Jamie Heywood, whose ferocious belief in openness has found expression in the PatientsLikeMe platform.

Ben, Jamie (it turns out), Gilles, and I will be on a “Patients and Online Communities” panel together at Health 2.0 Paris (along with four stellar EU panelists – check the agenda). It’s a hugely broad topic and I’m already thinking about the issues I’d like to discuss (including openness, health data rights, and whether consumers really understand the choices they make). What else should we talk about?

 

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