Google announced their long-awaited health record system yesterday. Reaction was certainly mixed but the common theme emerging from the blogosphere was: “How are we going to protect this valuable information?” From the release:

Each health profile, including information about prescriptions, allergies and medical histories, will be protected by a password that’s also required to use other Google services such as e-mail and personalized search tools.

As a user, I’m very nervous that I am only given the basic tool of username and password to protect all of this extremely valuable information.

This trend of more and more of our personal data ending up in the cloud continues unabated. Its a tough balancing act. I know I’ve struggled with how ads are presented in Gmail that are relevant to the current emails I’m reading. But, the utility of being able to search quickly and easily across all of my years of email is simply too strong to ignore. I just can’t do this on my desktop anymore. My computer is becoming an appliance to get access to this cloud of computing horsepower hooked up to my data.

Companies have understood the power of “corporate grade security” for years. The reasoning has always been, if you want to lock it down, you’ve got to pay for it. There are a bevy of solutions to help you do just this but they haven’t made sense from a cost perspective for users. The value equation is quickly moving to “must have” instead of “it would be nice to” with the movement of more and more personal data on-line. Enter Vidoop Secure:

Vidoop Secure is a software-only, multi-factor user login technology based on categorized images. When a user enrolls, he chooses image categories from a bank of possible image content (such as airplanes, cars, or keys). This constitutes the shared secret. Then, upon proof of receipt of an access code transmitted out-of-band by e-mail or phone, the user’s computer is activated with a software token.

We’re excited about Vidoop Secure (video). We have hooked this technology into our myvidoop.com OpenID provider to give users the means to secure their on-line identities. This is the first step in being able to take control of your personal data and give you the tools to better protect yourself.

Security is best done in layers; there is no silver bullet here. We’re hoping that we can help change the conversation in the coming years and get users to take some more ownership in how they manage and secure their on-line identities. From the looks of it, our on-line lives are only going to get more valuable. Don’t you want the means to protect it?