Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics : CQ : the international journal of healthcare ethics committees
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Recent highly publicized privacy breaches in healthcare and genomics research have led many to question whether current standards of data protection are adequate. Improvements in de-identification techniques, combined with pervasive data sharing, have increased the likelihood that external parties can track individuals across multiple databases. ⋯ However, there has been little discussion of whether and how to communicate the risk to potential donors. We review the ethical arguments behind favoring different types of risk communication in the consent process, and outline how identifiability concerns can be incorporated into either a detailed or a simplified method of communicating risks during the consent process.
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Camb Q Healthc Ethics · Jan 2018
The Chimes of Freedom: Bob Dylan, Epigrammatic Validity, and Alternative Facts.
This essay brings together work I have done over the past 10 years: on the nature of ethics, on the purpose of ethics, and on its foundations in a way that, I hope, as E. M. Forster put it, connects "the prose and the passion." I deploy lessons learned in this process to identify and face what I believe to be crucial challenges to science and to freedom (as defended by, among others, Cicero, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, and Bertrand Russell). Finally I consider threats to freedom of a different sort, posed by the creation and dissemination of "alternative facts" and by what is sometimes called "super" or "full" artificial intelligence (AI).