No matter how much you earn you are still a slave.

A slave with many masters.

Enslaved by free stuff.

And sold to a myriad of buyers.

Image credit: Paul Downey

Last week in a post about responsibility and the difference between Microsoft and other tech giants I said that change was coming, driven in by a surprising source.

The change is to antitrust law.

The University of Chicago is the intellectual birthplace of the consensus in antitrust thinking over the last four decades — that monopoly law should place consumer interests, usually in the form of lower prices, above the concerns of smaller business rivals.

Big tech has been protected, because you can’t get lower than free, but people are waking up to the fact that free isn’t actually free.

More importantly, so is the University of Chicago and a growing list of experts.

But amid growing concerns about the unchecked power of today’s tech giants, economists and legal scholars are questioning whether the Chicago School still makes sense. Even the university’s own faculty is starting to publicly challenge the ideology.

It’s about time.

Considering how fast the world moves these days there is no excuse for those who are supposed to protect us to move at glacial speed.

At last year’s summit, Makan Delrahim, the Justice Department official in charge of antitrust, told attendees that his view of the cost of free platforms “has changed” with a greater understanding of the nature and scope of data collection and sharing.

Duh. No kidding.

Makes you wonder how the European Union figured it out so much quicker.

Or not.

Image credit: Luiz Gadelha Jr.

Yesterday you met the founder of a tech company that voluntarily shut down because its app was being abused.

Google, however, is playing its standard game of privacy announcements that sound great, but…

Users can now opt-in to have their location data automatically deleted from Google every three or every 18 months, depending on their preference.

The catch, of course, is the timeframe. If you bother deleting your info daily or weekly, as do many people, especially from their kids phones, Google’s offer of three or 18 months isn’t very attractive.

That’s plenty of time for the data to migrate.

Win-win for Google.

Makes them sound as if they are doing something big for your privacy, without actually costing them anything.

Guess that’s the difference between a company with a real conscience and one with a good feel for PR.

Image credit: Joakim Jardenbergerg

Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

This post and the quote from the FTC dates back to 2015. Nothing on the government side has changed; the Feds are still investigating and Congress is still talking. And as we saw in last weeks posts the company executives are more arrogant and their actions are much worse. One can only hope that the US government will follow in the footsteps of European countries and rein them in.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Entrepreneurs are notorious for ignoring security — black hat hackers are a myth — until something bad happens, which, sooner or later, always does.

They go their merry way, tying all manner of things to the internet, even contraceptives and cars, and inventing search engines like Shodan to find them, with nary a thought or worry about hacking.

Concerns are pooh-poohed by the digerati and those voicing them are considered Luddites, anti-progress or worse.

Now Edith Ramirez, chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, voiced those concerns at CES, the biggest Internet of Things showcase.

“Any device that is connected to the Internet is at risk of being hijacked,” said Ms. Ramirez, who added that the large number of Internet-connected devices would “increase the number of access points” for hackers.

Interesting when you think about the millions of baby monitors, fitness trackers, glucose monitors, thermostats and dozens of other common items available and the hundreds being dreamed up daily by both startups and enterprise.

She also confronted tech’s (led by Google and Facebook) self-serving attitude towards collecting and keeping huge amounts of personal data that was (supposedly) the basis of future innovation.

“I question the notion that we must put sensitive consumer data at risk on the off chance a company might someday discover a valuable use for the information.”

At least someone in a responsible position has finally voiced these concerns — but whether or not she can do anything against tech’s growing political clout/money/lobbying power remains to be seen.

Image credit: centralasian

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Back in the late 2000s, when blogs were newish, there was a thing called Wordless Wednesday. The idea was to present your thoughts on a subject with a picture, instead of words. Anyway, I came across this one and it fit so well with a post I’m working on I decided to make it this weeks Oldie.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Image credit: Nick J Webb

Tech firms know a lot about you…

but that’s nothing compared to data brokers, who collect from everywhere and sell to anyone.

Your life.

Profiled in data.

With or without your permission.

Collected and sold to anyone.

Much of it done by your best friend Facebook.

For years.

When Facebook was challenged?

It took a traditional approach.

The next time, leadership denied and denied and denied.

When that didn’t work they again lied and lied and lied.

Then they hired a PR firm that essentially poured gasoline on burning waters.

And while Facebook is clearly the poster child for data misuse, Google, Amazon and Microsoft aren’t exactly on the side of the angels.

Politicians on both sides are weighing in, but, considering the money involved in US-approved corruption, AKA, lobbying, that effort is unlikely to move forward anytime soon.

One question comes to mind.

Is there anything more valuable than data?

The answer is yes.

Talent.

And the talent isn’t happy.

“Increasingly — and especially given the political environment — a key part of this consideration for workers has become the moral and ethical implications of the choices made by their employers, ranging from the treatment of employees or customers to the ethical implications of the projects on which they work. This is especially true given the central role of ‘big tech’ in new fears about information, rights, and privacy and the growing feeling that a lack of oversight in this sector has been harmful.” –Prasanna Tambe, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions

In fact, the hiring luster isn’t just thin, it’s becoming nonexistent.

“Before it was this glorious, magical thing to work there,” said Jazz Singh, 18, also studying computer science. (…) As Facebook has been rocked by scandal after scandal, some young engineers are souring on the company.

“Employees are wising up to the fact that you can have a mission statement on your website, but when you’re looking at how the company creates new products or makes decisions, the correlation between the two is not so tightly aligned,” said David Chie, the head of Palo Alto Staffing, a tech job placement service in Silicon Valley. “Everyone’s having this conversation.”

“They do a lot more due diligence,” said Heather Johnston, Bay Area district president for the tech job staffing agency Robert Half. “Before, candidates were like: ‘Oh, I don’t want to do team interviews. I want a one-and-done.’” Now, she added, job candidates “want to meet the team.”

“They’re not just going to blindly take a company because of the name anymore.”

The criticism by Google employees played out much more publicly.

More than 20,000 employees and contractors walked out of Google’s offices around the world Thursday, Nov. 1, organizers said. The group is protesting sexual harassment, misconduct, lack of transparency, and a non-inclusive workplace culture.

So.

Perhaps “we, the people” will have more force in the corporate world than it does elsewhere.

Image credit: Image credit: Marco Paköeningrat

There’s an old saying that stuff comes in threes.

A couple of months ago I wrote Privacy Dies as Facebook Lies.

Today I read a new article regarding Facebook’s data-sharing policies with so-called “service providers,” AKA, hardware partners.

Facebook has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung (…) to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers popular features of the social network, such as messaging, “like” buttons and address books. (…)

Some device partners can retrieve Facebook users’ relationship status, religion, political leaning and upcoming events, among other data. Tests by The Times showed that the partners requested and received data in the same way other third parties did.

Facebook’s view that the device makers are not outsiders lets the partners go even further, The Times found: They can obtain data about a user’s Facebook friends, even those who have denied Facebook permission to share information with any third parties. (…)

Last Friday KG sent me this image.

Considering the three together made me wonder.

Is Facebook a wolf or a pig?

Or both.

Image credit: Internet meme

Muema At The Precision Health Conference

Today I’m pleased to welcome Muema Lombe, a new voice at MAPping Company Success. He’ll be sharing news from conferences and interviews with founders.

Health 2.0 runs some of the best conferences for anyone passionate about the future of healthcare and medicine.  I just attended  its Technology for Precision Health Summit which focuses on predictive health and predictive medicine.

Linda Molnar, Chair of the Technology for Precision Health Summit, set to the tone for the day, speaking of what we can do today to improve care for the future.

In 2005, the market cap of Illumina, now the major gene sequencing company, was only $250 million. There was a relatively negligible amount of venture capital investment in digital healthcare. Now, in 2017, the market cap of Illumina, I checked this morning, is approaching $32 billion. And 2017 was a record-breaking year for venture capital invested in digital healthcare. When you start past $4 billion…

I sat next to Carmen Perez, a Healthcare professional passionate about innovation. Other attendees included physicians, researchers, oncologists and venture capitalists.

Claudia Williams, CEO of Manifest MedEx gave the Keynote.  Claudia served as Senior Advisor for Health Innovation and Technology in the Obama White House.  Claudia’s goal is to create an open platform of data, a health information exchange for the 21st century that brings together plans, providers, hospitals to share data and make it accessible through open API platform.

When I was at the White House, I helped launch and lead the precision medicine initiative, which was an ambitious project to found the framing hand of the 21st century, bringing together data, genomics data, health record data, wearable data from a million or more Americans, making that accessible on an open platform and with the goal of revolutionizing the discovery of new therapies and treatment.

Following Claudia’s Keynote, the first panel focused on Precision Medicine Pt. I – How Science and Technology are Changing Patient Care in Oncology.  We heard from Jonathan Hirsch, founder and president at Syapse, which is in the business of implementing precision medicine in oncology.

Also on the panel was Anna Barry, a molecular pathologist and the Scientific Director at the Personalized Medicine Program at Swedish, a large private hospital that’s very research focused. They have over 700 clinical trials.

We heard from Vineeta Agarwala, a Director of Product Management at Flatiron Health. Vineeta shared that she had the epiphany that if we don’t figure out how to annotate genomic data well, and annotate it well at scale, sequencing data will never make it into the clinic in a meaningful way.

At it’s core, one of Flatiron’s mission, we are an oncology focused health-tech company based in New York. We make both provider facing software, such as an EMR product that’s used by a significant fraction of the community of oncology practices all across the country as well as research product and data sets, that are gleaned, again, largely the wealth, the majority of cancer patients today, in American who happen to be seen at excellent community centers all across the country.

Trained as a Neuro-Oncologist, Andrew Norton, Chief Medical Officer at Koda Health was also on the panel.   Koda is a healthcare data analytics company, which focusing on cancer.

Essentially our core innovation that led to the founding of the company was the idea that without deep clinical data, and without the ability to stratify patients into meaningful, clinically determined sub-groups, you really can’t compare patient treatment pathways and outcomes across centers and across geography.

So essentially what we do, is we go into electronic medical records. We pull out all of the clinically relevant data that oncologists have told us matter in making treatment decisions, we condense that information into a digital code and then we use it to track patient treatment paths and outcomes over time. And really the fundamental goal of all that work is to enable providers to perform under value-based care contracts.

During the panel, Hirsch brought up that we have to think about it as how we combine molecular and clinical data and use that insight to enable a provider to make a better care decision for the patient.

He also made a very clear distinction between personalized medicine and precision medicine.

“And just to amplify that, we sometimes thing that there’s been a shift and personalized medicine and precision medicine are actually the same thing, and we’re just using different language. I don’t think that that’s the case. I really do think that there are these two complementary concepts of precision medicine being a data-driven approach and personalized, hopefully incorporating precision, but really thinking about the holistic care of the patient, supportive care services, psychological counseling, nutrition, etc. So I do think there are these two separate concepts, we shouldn’t confuse them. And both of them are incredibly important.”

Agarwala highlighted key questions we should consider including,

• Where is the data to help physicians help make a decision about whether or not a particular therapy will work?

• Where is the data to generate our collective understanding of what mutations confer resistance to therapy?

And I think today, while in some parts of the country there are molecular tumor boards and studies and post-effective studies that are extraordinary in their depth and characterization of patient outcomes they are not pervasive.

Unfortunately, for every patient who was in a study like that there are typically about a hundred who are undergoing the same type of care somewhere that’s completely silent to the research community. In a way that’s passive exhaust in our healthcare system that no one can access to learn from.”

There’s much more that I’ll share with you next week.

Image credit: Health 2.0

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

If you’re a guy and have a daughter/niece/sister/mom/female friend this post is for you.

If you’re a bro this post is especially for you.

You’ve all heard the stories of women who weren’t taken seriously as founders and couldn’t get funding.

You’ve heard it as anecdotal evidence, directly from women founders, and from those around them.

In fact, there’s finally enough data-driven proof that the fact can no longer be denied or blamed off on something else.

It’s not just investors; but suppliers, partners, and vendors who ignore/condescend/etc., when the other party is female.

Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer experienced all these problems when they launched Witchsy last year.

So they took a time-honored approach.

Having noticed that the mostly male artists, developers, and designers they were working with took their sweet time to respond to requests and were often slightly rude and condescending in email— “They’d say things like ‘Listen, girls…,’” Dwyer tells Quartz—they decided to bring in a male co-founder named Keith Mann to make communication easier.

Pre-Keith, Dwyer explains, “it was very clear no one took us seriously and everybody thought we were just idiots.” When “Keith” contacted collaborators, Gazin says, “they’d be like ‘Okay, bro, yeah, let’s brainstorm!’”

Keith only lasted six months, but, by then, being Keith had taught them to stop being communicating “like a girl.”

Neither the approach nor the result is unique; women have been obscuring their sex to get ahead for centuries. But…

In era that touts gender equality, even school-age children are still absorbing warped messages about the sexes. A recent study published in the journal Science revealed that by the time most girls are six, they believe that only males can be geniuses.

That means by the time a female hits first grade she’s already convinced she’s second best.

And that’s on you.

Image credit: HikingArtist and TechCrunch