Several members of Congress continued to express reservations about Google's new privacy policy after a closed-door meeting on Thursday, with one House member saying that Google's handling of sensitive medical searches may violate HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Members of the House Energy and Commerce committee grilled Pablo Chavez, Google's director of public policy, and Google attorney Michael Yang for about two hours. After the meeting, several of the Representatives expressed their unhappiness with Google's answers on a variety of privacy issues -- quest [...]

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Google Health, the company's attempt to improve health care by letting consumers move medical data online and control who can access it, is shutting down. The service will be retired on January 1, 2012. In a blog post announcing the news, Google says the product didn't catch on as it had hoped: Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would. There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven't found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread [...]

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Expanding on something it's been doing in the U.S. since last year, Google is now showing emergency information at the top of the search results in 13 countries. This means that searchers who type in queries that are the equivalent of English phrases like "poison control" and "emergency" will see special information above the search results. Here are two examples from Google's blog post: Google says the new results are available in these countries: Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom [...]

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Google announced a few new small features added recently. (1) Google Translate added Latin as a new language. Google said, "although considered a “dead language” by many, Latin is still studied by hundreds of thousands of students worldwide and is the predecessor to many modern tongues." I am sure those who study in this language welcome it to Google Translate. (2) Google has updated their flu shot location search in collaboration with the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services (HHS). The flu season is right around the corner and it might pay for you to get your shot earl [...]

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Google announced they have redesigned Google Health. The redesign primarily focuses on providing the user with access to wellness information. Users can track progress with their blood pressure, cholesterol, coffee intake, weight, and so on. Even more, users can set goals and watch their progression to meeting those goals. So if you want to track your progress in cutting down on mayonnaise, you can easily do that and see how it impacts your weight and blood pressure. In addition, you can add manual notes to your health journal. Google also added "several new partners" to Google H [...]

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