Susannah Fox testified at a meeting organized by the National
Committee on Vital Health Statistics and the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services to discover privacy, security, and
confidentiality issues around personal health records, social
media, and the future of medicine. The major points: There are
pockets of people who remain offline, but the advent of mobile
internet access may change that. Our understanding of what the
"internet" is will change over the next few years as more people
access it on small screens, wherever they are, not necessarily
on desktop screens at home or at work. Americans’ pursuit of
health takes place within a widening network of both online and
offline sources. Americans increasingly want access to
industrial-strength information, not consumer-strength. In the
political arena, more adults than ever before used the internet
to read or watch “unfiltered” campaign material last year, such
as candidate debates, announcements, position papers, and speech
transcripts. In the he