Reframing privacy

A week has gone my since MedX took place at Stanford, and at this point most of us are back to our “regular” lives. But as with any good meeting, the connections and rumination actively continues, and one of the things that I just can’t shake is a topic that came up briefly during a panel on communicating the experience of illness in the digital age: privacy.

A generation ago, we lived in a world where it was relatively inexpensive to remain private, and costly to make something public. Today, with online social networks making it so simple to share our lives, and “big data” evolving to help make sense out of this and other online information, this equation has flipped – it is now far more of an effort to remain private, while making information accessible to others is at times required (consider every time you have had to…