Denialism Blog

Author: denialism_bv2x6a

  • Disclaimers and such

    Last updated 09 October 2008

    When writing on medical topics, a few issues are important to address directly, conveniently laid out by the Health on the Net Foundation.

    Medical authority and complementarity, or, “I’m not your doctor”

    We don’t give advice here. Our posts represent our own opinions, thoughts, etc. and no one else’s. Neither our hospitals, partners, universities, nor anyone else has approved of anything we write. The information in our posts is intended for discussion purposes only and not as recommendations on how to diagnose or treat illnesses. Our writings do not claim to represent anyone’s opinions but the author.

    One our authors is a board-certified internist, one a medical student, and one an attorney. Any personal medical issues the reader may have should be referred to the reader’s physician. If the reader freely chooses to use some random anonymous blog to make medical decisions, well, that would be just foolish. See your own doctor, damn it, he’s got boat payments to make.

    Intended Audience

    This blog has a variety of posts written a varying levels of complexity. We have readers in high school, octogenarians, and many in between. Readers have indicated many levels of education from high school to doctorates. All are welcome. Some people will find some posts too simplistic, others too complex. Such is life.

    Confidentiality and Privacy

    Confidentiality is more important than any other principle in medical writing. I always change significant data about clinical cases, which can include gender, place, temporal relationships, and other potentially identifying data. Cases are often amalgams of different patients’ stories.

    Please remember that any information you submit through comments or email are inherently un-secure. If you wouldn’t shout it from the rooftops, don’t send it to me or post it in a comment. That being said, I will never intentionally divulge personal information or contact information of our visitors.

    Type whatever you will, but your email or comment may become the subject of a new post, and that isn’t always a good thing for the commenter.

    Additionally, Seed Media Group has its own privacy policy here.

    Advertising, funding, and compensation

    Seed Media Group, LLC owns ScienceBlogs.com and pays its writers a modest stipend. They do not exert any editorial control. They do, however, control the advertising seen on top of the page and right hand column. I do not choose ads, nor do I advocate for or benefit directly from them. The center and left columns belong to the authors, the top and right to our Seed masters.

    Contact info

    All of the authors have a short bio on the left sidebar with contact information. If you really can’t help yourself, drop us a line.

  • What Happened?

    Hello?
    (tap tap)
    Hello?
    (tap)
    Is this thing on?

    OK. I think it’s working.

    Wow. I mean, wow. Someone seems to have accidentally dropped the keys to denialism blog on my desk, so now I’m in ur blogz, messing with ur words and stuff.

    That’s really the only logical explanation. I mean, how else could I, a lowly Doctor of Medicine in a dreary Midwestern town, end up writing on Sb?

    I guess I owe you an explanation…
    (more…)

  • Measuring Identity Theft at Top Banks (Version 1.0)

    I’ve been AWOL from Denialism Blog because one of my UC-Berkeley projects has become all-consuming.

    I’m interested in sparking a market for identity theft protection. A real one. One where consumers can actually make choices among banks based on their actual ability to address security attacks. Last year, I published Identity Theft: Making the Unknown Knowns Known, (PDF) an article making a legal and policy argument in favor of mandated public disclosure of identity theft statistics by banks.

    In this vein, today, I’m releasing “Measuring Identity Theft at Top Banks (Version 1.0),” my first attempt to rank the top 25 US banks according to their relative incidence of identity theft. It is based on consumer-submitted complaints to the FTC where the victim identified an institution. The data show that some institutions have a far greater incidence of identity theft than others. If you don’t want to open the PDF, check out the Times coverage and peek at this chart!

    i-fb2c828fdef6c88eb0e1e7a72d8d2da1-rate_top25banks.png

  • Why Privacy Is What It Is…

    The Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe have just released their annual Most Trusted Companies for Privacy report. As part of this report, the groups asked consumers about the factors–positive and negative–that shaped their perceptions of companies’ privacy practices. (Full disclosure: I am a fellow of the Ponemon Institute.)

    Bar Charts 3 and 4 in the Ponemon/TRUSTe survey are instructive. In Chart 3, we see that the strongest indicators for trust among consumers is reputation, respect for consumers, and product quality. This explains why certain information-intensive companies, such as Amazon.com and American Express, are routinely top-ranked for privacy trust. A smaller number of consumers is evaluating companies on actual privacy practices–limits on sharing of data, disclosures around policies, and the presence of third-party reputation seals.

    i-3e79ebf4a285379623797ebf003b47e5-trustgraphs.jpg

    Chart 4 shows what factors decrease privacy trust, and the most influential factor is a data security breach. “Irresponsible marketing” is next, which I assume means that one receives some type of advertising pitch from the company. Again, these constitute the information most available to consumers, and are not truly indicative of a company’s respect for consumer privacy.

    Studies such as Ponemon’s help us understand why companies do not compete on policies that maximize privacy rights. One problem is that consumers don’t possess the best information to evaluate and compare companies’ practices. Privacy policies go unread, but even when read, they have other shortcomings. They can be beyond comprehension, contradictory, or simply vague about actual practices. As a result, other characteristics of a company are used as shorthand to assess “trust,” and this introduces unfairness and arbitrariness into the evaluation of a company on privacy.

  • Can One Live Anonymously?

    I’ve spent the last few months working with an excellent journalist on the Anonymity Experiment, which will appear in this month’s Popular Science magazine. In it, Catherine Price attempts to live a normal life without revealing personal data:

    …when this magazine suggested I try my own privacy experiment, I eagerly agreed. We decided that I would spend a week trying to be as anonymous as possible while still living a normal life. I would attempt what many believe is now impossible: to hide in plain sight.

    […]

    Tall and friendly, Hoofnagle has an enthusiastic way of talking about privacy violations that could best be described as “cheerful outrage.” He laid out my basic tasks: Pay for everything in cash. Don’t use my regular cellphone, landline or e-mail account. Use an anonymizing service to mask my Web surfing. Stay away from government buildings and airports (too many surveillance cameras), and wear a hat and sunglasses to foil cameras I can’t avoid. Don’t use automatic toll lanes. Get a confetti-cut paper shredder for sensitive documents and junk mail. Sign up for the national do-not-call registry (ignoring, if you can, the irony of revealing your phone number and e-mail address to prevent people from contacting you), and opt out of prescreened credit offers. Don’t buy a plane ticket, rent a car, get married, have a baby, purchase land, start a business, go to a casino, use a supermarket loyalty card, or buy nasal decongestant. By the time I left Hoofnagle’s office, a week was beginning to sound like a very long time.

    Her week is very interesting, and she experiences some funny anecdotes in buying a wireless phone anonymously, getting to and from San Francisco, and using the internet with anonymous proxies. Worth a read!

  • Save Katie!

    Today, I joined about 100 hooligans in the anti-scientology protest in San Francisco, as part of Project Chanology, a large-scale effort to call attention to abuses committed by the cult of Scientology. Many protestors had serious signs that called attention to the various ways in which Scientology censors speech and defrauds people. But after watching this crazy video of Tom Cruise, the Viking and I decided that the real victim of all this craziness is Katie Holmes. Poor Katie.

    i-590f23413825e970e2801db06aa79fdb-IMG_2957.jpg

  • Welcome to Costco, I love You

    Life often imitates art.

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  • The Dog Ate My Ballot, or, Why Obama May Not Deliver

    Obama has created a lot of excitement among young people. On Tuesday, young people waiving Obama signs were all over the Berkeley campus and downtown San Francisco. Hillary’s supporters were rarely seen, it seemed.

    You’ll note that I didn’t call these supporters “young voters.”

    Why?

    Because young people don’t vote. What’s my evidence of this (well-established) rule?

    Even Obama Girl, the young woman who has spent the last year making videos about Obama’s campaign, didn’t vote! So sad.

  • Mormons Troubled By Spotlight

    Suzanne Sataline reports in today’s Journal about the intense spotlight that has been focused on the Mormon church as a result of the Romney campaign. The criticism has been so intense that the church has hired a public relations firm to battle it, and has encouraged young Mormons to blog about their religion. Perhaps what’s most interesting is this poll:

    i-f2cba3d9bdf4e47a7a41bb30445040d1-mormonpoll.jpg

    This is somewhat surprising, and I think good news. It’s about time that deciding in adulthood to be a member of a cult brings one more criticism than being born a certain sex or race!

  • The Direct Marketing Association's New Math

    I came across this statistic the other day while doing some research on marketing fraud:

    In recent years, despite the creation of a national “do not call” registry, the legitimate telemarketing industry has grown, according to the Direct Marketing Association. Callers pitching insurance plans, subscriptions and precooked meals collected more than $177 billion in 2006, an increase of $4.5 billion since the federal do-not-call restrictions were put in place three years ago.

    This all sounds very unlikely. And I recall from years of working on telemarketing regulation that the DMA used suspicious revenue numbers in order to influence the FCC and FTC, and prevent the creation of the Telemarketing Do-Not-Call Rule. You’ll note that many of their numbers concern 2001, the year before Do-Not-Call was being considered by the FTC.

    So, tonight I did a quick search of the DMA’s website, noting all the times they they made a claim to regulators or in a press release about revenue from telemarketing. The result? Not only are the numbers suspiciously high, they seem to change…in the same year:

    • “Telemarketing Sales” 1996: $63,100,000,000
    • “Telemarketing Sales” 2000: $86,900,000,000
    • “Telemarketing Sales” 2001: $93,800,000,000
    • Sales to consumers in 2001: “nearly $270 billion”
    • Sales to consumers in 2001: $296,000,000,000
    • “Telephone Marketing Generated $668 Billion in 2001 and Employed Six Million”
    • “The teleservices industry employs more than four million people and provides product offerings directly to consumers that resulted in $275 billion in sales in 2001.”
    • “In 2001…customers purchased $661 billion in goods and services – accounting for almost six percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).”
    • Sales to consumers in 2001: $274,200,000,000
    • Sales to businesses in 2001: $390,000,000,000
    • “Telemarketing Sales” 2002: $100,000,000,000
    • “We will protect the integrity of the American teleservices industry, which generated over $700 billion last year [2002] for the U.S. economy, by respecting consumer preferences.”