About:
Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Data by Adam Tanner is a non-fiction book talking about how companies use big medical data. Mr. Tanner writes about business and personal data and privacy issues.
- 248 pages
- Publisher: Beacon Press
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0807033340
My rating for Our Bodies, Our Data– 5
Buy Our Bodies, Our Datafrom Amazon.com*
More Books by Adam Tanner
Thoughts:
Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Data by Adam Tanner is a sometimes fascinating, sometimes frightening book telling how our medical records are used to analysis and profit. The data, which strips personally identifiable information (but not really) is being collected by middle men from doctors, pharmacies, hospitals and other medical professionals one comes in touch with, and is being sold.
The public reasoning that the data is being collected is to improve our health by analyzing trends and helping doctors. The data is also collected and sold for analysis by marketing companies in order to help their bottom lines and this is where most people have an issue.
The pharmaceutical industry doesn’t really care if people have an issue with their use of the data, even though it is possible to de-identified the data (attributing it to a specific person after all personal information has been stripped out). The book asks a lot of questions but the answers are vague at best as this sensitive data is being sold, analyzed and re-sold at lightning speed.
Mr. Tanner wrote a well-researched and very interesting book which raises important issues. The answers might lie with our policy makers and I could only hope they’ll read it.
Buy Our Bodies, Our Datafrom Amazon.com*
More Books by Adam Tanner
Zohar — Man of la Book
Disclaimer: I got this book for free
*Amazon links point to an affiliate account
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