🥟 Chao-Down #24: Mental health data for sale

Today’s headline story is the shocking revelation that our health data, which has exploded from the pandemic-fueled rise in mental health apps, can be legally sold without our consent.

As the Washington Post reports, HIPAA, The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, only limits how “covered health entities” like hospitals and doctors’ offices can share American health data. Startups and tech companies are under no such restriction and can package and sell data however they please. 

With that data, a buyer could know roughly how many people in a given zip code might be depressed or even more explicitly, the names, addresses, and incomes of those suffering from some ailment.

Health data is some of the most sensitive and private data we have. And we know AI and machine learning feeds off data. So just know the next time you download another wellness app, don’t be surprised if your information shows up on a marketplace sold to the highest bidder.

-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.

What happened in AI? 📰

Now for sale: Data on your mental health (Washington Post)

AI is dreaming up drugs that no one has ever seen. Now we've got to see if they work. (MIT Technology Review)

Elon Musk Takes Aim at Microsoft as Bing AI Goes Off the Rails (Futurism)

Googlers Need to Spend 2 to 4 Hours Helping Improve Bard Chatbot (Business Insider)

Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖

Health Checks for ML Model Deployments (link)

How does in-context learning work? A framework for understanding the differences from traditional supervised learning (SAIL Blog)

Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠

Webcontainer API - What if ChatGPT could not only write code in your browser, but also execute it? Twitter

The Latest in AI Research 💡

The Capacity for Moral Self-Correction in Large Language Models (arxiv)

What learning algorithm is in-context learning? Investigations with linear models (arxiv)

The World Outside of AI 🌎

After a decade in development, Japan’s H3 rocket is ready for its debut (Ars Technica)

Discovery of a New Brain Disease in Children Could Help Us Understand Dementia (ScienceAlert)

The maze is in the mouse. What ails Google. And how it can turn things around (Medium)

One Last Bite 😋