The Technophilez

Google on Monday launched Google Health, a long-anticipated medical records service letting US users store and manage their health care information online. 

The offering raises privacy concerns and draws yet another battle line between Internet search king Google and global software giant Microsoft, which began offering a similar HealthVault service in October.

"It isn't surprising both sides are going after it," Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle told AFP.

He said the service was likely to strongly appeal to "Baby Boomers" -- the generation of Americans born between the late 1940s and early 1960s.

"Health care is not just lucrative -- you are solving a problem critical to an aging group of Boomers. There are public relations and business benefits to it," he said.

Google said it built a secure computer platform separate from its search system to host medical records as part of an emphasis on keeping the health information protected.

"We have put in place the firmest privacy policy we can construct," Google vice president of search product and user experience Marissa Mayer told reporters at the Internet giant's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

"It is our highest level of security."

Privacy advocates however, seek proof that online medical information will be safe from tampering or snooping, possibly from insurance companies or employers out to reduce liabilities by shunning those with health issues.

"It's the Wild West online," said Deborah Peel, a psychiatrist who founded the nonprofit advocacy group PatientPrivacyRights.org. "The risks are massive."

She said Microsoft consulted her group while designing HealthVault and agreed to routine privacy audits, the first of which is to be completed in June.

Google executives said pains were taken to build a system that will protect people's medical records while providing them access from wherever they might want it.

"No Google Health users should expect to find their health information as search results on Google," product manager Roni Zeiger said.

Google Health has links to pharmacies, clinics and diagnostic labs. The service is free and enables people to have electronic copies of information such as prescriptions, lab test results, hospital stays, and medical conditions stored on Google computers.

Users of the service dictate how the information is shared.

"Google, on your behalf, is storing a copy of your records," Zeiger said. "This is a user controlled database that Google is hosting."

Google said it will mine anonymous trend data along the lines of what percentage of people with diabetes using Google Health report getting flu shots.

Google search boxes are on Health pages and targeted advertising is displayed with query results, according to Zeiger.

But Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said targeting health searches with ads was tantamount to tracking users' medical issues for advertisers.

"There is no question in my mind that at the end of the day this is about marketing pharmacology and health related products to consumers," he told AFP.

"Google, Microsoft and others see dollar signs in your diagnosis."

Google said it built protected online connections with a host of major US medical service providers and is open to working with other health care outlets interested in crafting software to join the network.

Dean Ornish, a California professor of medicine and founder of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute, enthused about the new service.

"I'm excited by this because it really empowers people with getting more control over their information," said Ornish, who is on a medical advisory board working with Google on health.

People can link heart monitors to Google Health so vital statistics can be fed to a heart attack assessment services online.

A "virtual pillbox" will also automatically send alerts to people's mobile telephones, reminding them when it is time to take medicines.

Windows Vista customers can now receive the first service pack for the operating system via the Microsoft Automatic Update service, Microsoft said Wednesday.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 will download automatically to PCs that have the automatic update feature of the OS turned on, the company said. Previously, Vista was available to customers via Windows Update, but people had to specifically download it.

Not all customers will receive SP1 immediately via Automatic Update, however. The company is distributing it in phases to "ensure a seamless download experience," Microsoft said. A timeline for when all customers would receive Vista SP1 via Automatic Update was not immediately available.

SP1 is a rollout of software updates that fix bugs and glitches in Vista and is seen as a milestone that will inspire many customers -- especially those in the business market -- to adopt the OS. In fact, in a recent report, "Building the Business Case for Windows Vista," Forrester Research said more business customers plan to upgrade to Vista now that SP1 is available. This comes as no surprise, considering companies often wait for the first service pack after a major Windows release to update corporate desktops.

However, even SP1 will not guarantee that enterprises and business customers currently running XP or an earlier version of Windows will upgrade, as some have said they would skip the OS altogether. The same Forrester report said as much, although the research firm is recommending that companies don't skip Vista because they would not be well-positioned for future versions of Windows if they do.

The mission to build a common login for all sites across the Internet has taken one giant step forward. Five, actually.

The OpenID Foundation announced today that Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, IBM and VeriSign would become its first corporate board members.

"This really puts, very strongly and clearly, an important first piece of the puzzle in place," said Bill Washburn, executive director of the OpenID Foundation.

Washburn told InternetNews.com that Web entrepreneurs and site operators have increasingly acknowledged the need for a trusted universal identifier that site visitors can use to access all their favorite Internet destinations.

Though a number of initiatives have emerged to provide common logins, most notably Microsoft's Passport, "none has taken hold," Washburn said.

Possibly until now. Today's announcement could provide OpenID with the momentum it needs to win support from other companies that have so far stayed on the sidelines, supporters say.

OpenID began as a grassroots movement in 2005. While it can now boast the support of more than 10,000 Web sites, phishing and other security concerns have hindered adoption.

Doubters have also been skeptical that enough sites would ever accept it to fulfill OpenID's promise of becoming a universal identifier.

Last June, OpenID's early community members formed the foundation to give the effort legal and organizational support. Several large companies also began making more serious overtures to the movement, including some that today joined its board.

Of the companies now joining the board, Yahoo has perhaps been the most vocal proponent of OpenID. Last month, the portal giant announced its full support of OpenID 2.0, making it the largest issuer of OpenID logins.

Security concerns have prevented Yahoo from becoming a relying party, however, meaning that the portal giant does not accept OpenID logins issued by other sites.

The involvement of IBM, and especially VeriSign, should address the security concerns of the OpenID movement, Washburn said.

VeriSign also has a long partnership with OpenID, said Nico Popp, the company's vice president of innovation. Popp told InternetNews.com that in the future, a top priority will be to ensure that the standards and protocol of OpenID remain open.

"We will definitely be very active supporting the mission of the foundation," he said. "The core mission is to protect the intellectual property," he added, citing the success of open security protocols SSL and DNS.

Combining the brain trusts behind VeriSign Identity Provider and IBM's Tivoli identity management software should go a long way to secure OpenID while ensuring that the protocols remain open, supporters said.

IBM makes for a natural partner for OpenID, because of its historic embrace of open protocols in enterprise, said Tony Nadalin, an IBM distinguished engineer and the chief security architect of Tivoli.

Nadalin said IBM had been working actively to promote a common identifier among enterprise applications, and saw in OpenID the opportunity to expand into the public Web.

"Our goal is to better enable the Web technology along with the enterprise technology as far as identity management is concerned," Nadalin told InternetNews.com.

As far as Microsoft and Google go, OpenID might actually give them something to agree on. Microsoft has expressed support for OpenID for a year, and Google has already deployed the standard on its Blogger property, both issuing OpenID logins and accepting those from other sites.

That Google has taken the first tentative step to becoming a relying party is significant for Washburn, and he hopes that more Google-owned sites will begin accepting externally issued OpenID logins -- and encouraging its proliferation.

"The expectation is that it will become pervasive," he said.

Washburn said that although the foundation will continue recruiting companies of all sizes to support the OpenID standard, it is not likely to add any more board members. The foundation is also clear that board members serve in an advisory capacity, but do not make decisions about how the OpenID standard and the community around it develop.

He also said he hopes a few specific online communities will enter the OpenID fold.

"I personally would love to see Craigslist getting serious about identity," he said, adding quickly that he is a big fan of the site. "Ninety-nine percent of the people are honest," he said, but clearing out those who aren't with identity authentication could improve the community.

He would also welcome the major social networks to follow Plaxo's lead in joining up with OpenID. However, he noted that those companies are still young, and it often takes time for sites to warm up to ideas like OpenID.

"We would just jump at the chance for them to become part of this," Washburn said. "It would clearly be something that the young users on the Net would be able to run with."

Microsoft Corp. Monday gave users of its Office 2003 application suite a 30-day warning that it will begin pushing the software's Service Pack 3 via Microsoft Update next month.

The notice followed a dustup earlier this month over new security settings in Office 2003 SP3 that blocked access to a swath of older file formats. After users complained on the company's support forums, and a software rival asked why its files were being barred, Microsoft apologized and posted work-arounds to make it easier for users to unblock the formats.

Monday, Microsoft announced that it would add Office 2003 SP3 to its Microsoft Update listings beginning Feb. 27. Microsoft Update, a companion service to Windows Update, downloads patches and other fixes for the operating system as well as a number of the company's applications, notably Office.

"Those customers who have not already installed SP3 and that have chosen to receive updates automatically will start to receive the service pack as early as February 27," a Microsoft spokeswoman said today in an e-mail. "[But] the distribution through [Microsoft Update] is a gradual process and so not every customer will see the service pack on February 27."

Microsoft Update and Windows Update take their instructions from the client PC's Automatic Updates settings; those let users specify whether updates will be automatically downloaded and installed, downloaded but not installed, or not downloaded.

Users who do not wish to automatically upgrade their copies of Office 2003 must set Automatic Updates to the second or third option above.

Microsoft's Office and Update teams said that the warning is in keeping with a policy that debuted with Office 2007 SP1, when the company promised that it would give users a 30-day warning before turning on an automatic service-pack update. In December, Reed Shaffner, worldwide product manager for Office, promised that Microsoft would not use Microsoft Update to deliver Office 2007's SP1 for at least three months, perhaps longer.

"This policy seems to have worked really well with SP3 because it gave the market plenty of time to evaluate the service pack, gave us time to address concerns, and now we can push it to the hundreds of millions of users who depend on us to keep them secure," said the two teams in a combined posting to a company blog.

Office 2003 SP3 was unveiled by Microsoft last September and has been available for downloading from the company's Web site since then.