Would you give up privacy to help cure disease?

Let's say that an effort was underway to create a massive database of people's exercise habits and diets for one year, and your doctor would enter your disease diagnoses into the same database. In ten years, the database could possibly correlate certain foods and behaviors with diseases or lack of diseases. Would that be something you would participate in?

What if it involved not being able to purchase food without an ID card? What if your children also had to carry their own separate ID cards? What if, to make the data much more reliable, the ID card was replaced with a thumbprint? Grocery stores, restaurants, gas stations, and even food stands at the county fair wouldn't be allowed to sell you food unless they could put your purchase information in the database.

Is that Big Brother in action? What if tracking your every food purchase could help lead to a cure for diabetes? Cancer? AIDS? Would you give up your privacy to help?

If you have an objection, is it that governments would try to obtain the data to better track you? Maybe it's the possibility of the police getting your fingerprints that is worrisome. Maybe you don't want your boss to know just how much alcohol you consume.

I expect many people would be worried about the scenario expanding. Let's say it is believed that more detailed information about people would yield more interesting results. Now the researchers want to know what your smog level is, get soil and ground water samples from your yard. Now they need to know where you live.

Maybe they want emission levels form your cars and how long you spend in the car, and what areas you drive through. If everyone who drives through suburb X regularly is twice as likely to get cancer, would you want to know it? Would it be worth letting your movements be tracked?

Taking this to the extreme, what if you could just be given a medical implant, and all the other items, the thumbprints, the car trackers, your address being revealed, etc., could be eliminated? The implant could identify food eaten, heart rate, blood sugar, and your current location, and would do nothing but record. It could not deliver information to anyone until after your death, and then would give no information about anyone else. Has your right to privacy been violated now? Would you take the implant?

What's my answer? To all of these unlikely scenarios, I would participate in any of them, provided that most of my fellow man also did. My only objection would be to sticking out, being tracked while no one else is; I'd rather blend in.

What about potential misuses of the data? Well, what about current potential misuses that most of us are subject to already? I buy most things with a debit card, which makes my purchases trackable. To volunteer at schools and for Big Brothers/Big Sisters, I had to submit to a background check and give my fingerprints. Each time I donate blood, a sample is taken for drug and disease testing, and my DNA could easily be extracted from it. My medical and dental records can be subpoenaed.

I already am trackable by Big Brother. But I'm not alone; my fellow man is as subject to this as I am. Does it make me worried that I could be singled out and followed around until I did something double-plus ungood and became an unperson? A little, especially since under post 9/11 powers, federal investigators can detain me indefinitely without a charge or access to a lawyer. Do I wake up at night in a cold sweat about that possibility? No.

My point is this: Our privacy is already compromised. Why not go all the way and use this potential mound of data to help cure disease?