Facebook Goes to the Doctor


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Abstract

The use of computer-based social networks for health care changes the privacy paradigm of face-to-face treatment. For example, in an office, a patient can be reasonably sure that the physician or therapist is the only one present, and is who has been providing treatment. On a computer-based social network, communications travel over the World Wide Web, raising the possibility of eavesdropping, delay, and other problems. Further, verification of the party with whom the patient is communicating is more difficult, and to many less credible, than in-person verification. This paper describes the privacy paradigm, presents a set of requirements for effective use of computer-based social networks in health care, discusses what current technology can provide, and what gaps must be closed to meet the rest of the requirements.

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© ACM, 2011. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the 2011 Workshop on Governance of Technology, Information, and Policies, Dec. 2011, and is available at http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2076496.2076498.