The fascinating and difficult challenge of translucency is: Which data are left in the clear to enable search, and which data are hidden until post-search decryption?

Or, as per Jeff Jonas’ work on ANNA (http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2007/02/to_anonymize_or.html, http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2006/03/advanced_analyt.html), which search- and match-enabling data are normalized, hashed, and then only ever revealed by compelled disclosure?

Of course the information would require my participation to de-encrypt it (not so great for an emergency-room scenario), but might otherwise be sensible?

NCBI:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?term=compelled%20disclosure

Of course not.

“There is a tension between privacy and the emergency need to know that is entirely social and cannot be solved by encryption and biometrics or http.”

Agreed. We are going to have to tread carefully through a thicket of incredibly thorny issues, and we’re not going to emerge unscathed.

But unless you believe we should not go there at all — and I don’t — we need to take some first steps. This is an important first step.

web technology alone cannot solve distributed health records.
Their is a tension between privacy and the emergency need to know that is entirely social and cannot be solved by encryption and biometrics or http.

Plus

From: http://www.openehr.org/getting_started/t_openehr_primer.htm

Health Information Systems today suffer from a number of key problems:

* lack of interoperability and vendor (M$?) lock-in;
* cost and difficulty of maintenance, given the rate of change and sheer size of the information in the health domain;
* lack of support for security, privacy and consent.

I completely agree. I am glad Google has not done anything yet, and my feeling is that the data ownership issue is a key reason why.