Odd spot: When data gets creepy - the secrets we don’t realise we’re giving away

Ben Goldacre says that we all worry about digital spies stealing our data – and now even the things we thought we were happy to share are being used in ways we don’t like.

Why aren’t we making more of a fuss? Because not really understanding the technology, we have few sound intuitions into what is safe and what is flimsy when it comes to securing our digital lives – let alone what is ethical and what is creepy. See Ben Goldacre's entire essay.

See also

• The Roast ABC TV 2 July 2014 critique of Facebook's ethics violations, at timepoint 7.30.
• Did Facebook's experiment violate ethics? edition.cnn.com/2014/07/02/opinion/klitzman-facebook-experiment/

Odd spot: Ben Goldacre, author of 'Bad Science', on randomisation

Cartoon: xkcd comic

“Randomisation is not a new idea. It was first proposed in the seventeenth century by John Baptista van Helmont, a Belgian radical who challenged the academics of his day to test their treatments like blood-letting and purging (based on ‘theory’) against his own, which he said were based more on clinical experience: ‘Let us take out of the hospitals, out of the Camps, or from elsewhere, two hundred, or five hundred poor People, that have Fevers, Pleurisies, etc. Let us divide them into half, let us cast lots, that one half of them may fall to my share, and the other to yours … We shall see how many funerals both of us shall have.” 
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

Odd spot: Epidemiologist and doctor Ben Goldacre gives a TED talk on Bad Science

Dr Ben Goldacre giving his TED talk

Every day there are news reports of new health advice, but how can you know if they're right? Doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre shows us, at high speed, the ways evidence can be distorted, from the blindingly obvious nutrition claims to the very subtle tricks of the pharmaceutical industry.

www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science