(Noema) – Sensitive data about your health used to be relatively safe and anonymous. AI is making it much easier for that information to be used against you in opaque ways.

Within days of the diagnosis, I entered the inner workings of a weird machine. Every milestone of my journey through cancer was conveyed to me through a digital health record system set up by the government in Hungary, where I am from. The system delivered a digitized pathology report that informed me of local metastasis (the cancer’s spread to my lymphatic system) and how that would be treated. In effect, I was being told of the increased likelihood of my early death, and also how that might possibly be avoided, by a database that had been designed to free up my doctors’ time.

The way in which frightening information was delivered over those months deepened my depression and worsened the feeling that I was losing control of my own health and life. But in navigating EESZT, as the Hungarian database is known, something else came into view: I became very aware that I didn’t know who had access to my information. Was it just my oncologists — or other doctors too? (Read More)