That’s the thing though, many folks have tried to get into the medical industries only to find how much of a crap show it is and how much money you waste before they break even. This isn’t the area that techbros think it is where they’ll get a huge wind fall. The only area where I can see this going into their favor is advertising since they can keep fooling firms into buying as much click as they can give (clicks are cheaper than radio or tv ads) even if they’re largely ineffective like their predecessors. But the fact is even advertising is slowly becoming a thing they can’t depend on with ad blockers being far more effective and adopted more widely than they assumed (I think 2018 is the year of the online ad-apocalypse considering).
Don’t underestimate them.
Just have a look at Alphabet. Calico and Verily might look like small things in the whole of the thing, but they are very much long-term strategy firms.
Also, one seriously major problem in using medical data is how to make sense of it. There is so much of it, and biological systems are quite variable and flexible.
But that’s literally the information in IT. These companies deal with amounts of data already and have people who do nothing else but think about ways how to make sense of information.
That’s the long term plan. If they can tackle this while doing other stuff, they will make money.
And you gave the reason for their interest yourself:
It truly is, especially in terms of data.
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I can’t think of a sensible way to hash that permanently anonymizes. So I’d be really interested to hear about the details of the proposed “hashing” algorithm.
An example of a nightmare scenario: an employer “hashes” the name on your job application (or finds your Facebook account ID and hashes that) and then pairs it up with “anonymized” healthcare data available through a third party. And doesn’t hire you because one of your relatives (or even worse, one of your Facebook :“friends”) has some unpleasant disease. So the hashing details really matter.
How on earth do they think they can protect long-term anonymity through a hashing algorithm? Whether I’m Ed Roland, or FE9F3746A924, the effects are pretty much the same, as long as somebody can hash Ed Rowland + whatever secondary details they use to generate the hash. And I can’t think of any secondary details that both Facebook and a health provider would have that pretty much anyone else can’t get too.
There’s a story in there that really needs to be told!
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So, does this mean “evil geniuses” really do exist, like in comic books? Because everything I read about Zuckerberg and Facebook seems to point towards a huge premeditated plan (maybe even from very early on) to ensnare everyone’s data through dishonesty and trickery.
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You just nailed the advertising industry.
Only now people are the product and companies are the buyers.
Evil genius really.
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This century has definitely shot down anyone’s ability to say that comic book, Captain Planet, or Dickensian villains are ever too blatantly over-the-top evil. (Hashtag ScroogeDidNothingWrong hashtag CaptainPlanetIsAnSJW)
At this point I’m just waiting for the VC-backed plan to blow open the San Andreas Fault in order to double the amount of beachfront property in California…
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He stared me down once from about a foot away. I’ve never had such an unnerving experience with another person’s gaze. Cannot say if it was from sheer terror on his part (that I actually cared who he was) but there was a very strong feeling of piercing emptiness.
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Oh, and while we’re at it:
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He doesn’t see people as people. He probably views reality around him the way he views Facebook: as a vast, vast dataset to be utterly controlled and exploited.
The evil geniuses are the ones who do it while maintaining a benevolent image. It’s kind of terrifying how many of the things Facebook is rightly criticized for are eagerly accepted when it’s other companies doing them.
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“Last month, we decided that we should pause these discussions so we can focus on other important work, including doing a better job of protecting people’s data,” the company said.
The above from a BBC article about this. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43668607
Note - PAUSE. Not stop or cancel. It’ll be back.
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This is the final nail in the coffin of the coffin that transformed the Social Personal Information Database for Dumb Fucks into the Let’s Earn Money Any Which Way company.
Facebook has a blatant viciousness about its data collection that gives it a certain je ne sais quoi which makes it easy to target.
But don’t forget that in terms of surveillance, Google is the worst. That’s where we should be aiming our guns. I back Richard Stallman’s proposal: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/03/facebook-abusing-data-law-privacy-big-tech-surveillance
Let’s ban registration of data that are not necessary for the system’s primary function. Which means that Google would be banned from all of its data mining. Harsh? No, necessary - no more, no less than necessary.
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The most useful information on facebook are the blocklists.
Want to find someone with bad boundaries and few stopping points? Well, there’s a way to estimate that if you can see who a lot of folks don’t want to know anymore. Useful info to the machiavellibergs of the world.
I like to believe this, because if they DID ask for hospital issues we would have seen that ages ago. BUT, there’s none! This has to be a hoax.
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