Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 11/12 - Google Wants Your Medical Records

Starting point is 00:00:00 On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech Meme Right Home for Tuesday, November 12th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google has hoovered up the health records of millions of folks without telling anyone. Instagram debuts a TikTok competitor. Facebook debuts, Facebook pay, WordPress.com debuts recurring payments,

Starting point is 00:00:51 and Disney Plus literally just debuts. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, I guess now Alphabet's acquisition of Fitbit makes a lot more sense. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google has partnered with Ascension, the second largest health care system in the United States to analyze the personal health info of millions of people across 21 states. This is part of an initiative inside Google called Project Nightingale, quoting the journal. Google began Project Nightingale in secret last year with St. Louis-based Ascension, a Catholic chain of 2,600 hospitals, doctors offices, and other facilities, with the data sharing accelerating since the summer,

Starting point is 00:01:38 according to internal documents. The data involved in the initiative encompasses lab results, doctor diagnoses, and hospitalization records, among other categories, and amounts to a complete health history, including patient names and dates of birth. Neither patients nor doctors have been notified. At least 150 Google employees already have access to much of the data on tens of millions of patients, according to a person familiar with the matter and the documents. In a news release issued after the Wall Street Journal reported on Project Nightingale on Monday, the company said the initiative is compliant with federal health law and includes robust protections for patient data. Some Ascension employees have raised questions about the way the data is

Starting point is 00:02:21 being collected and shared, both from a technological and ethical perspective, according to the people familiar with the project. But privacy experts said it appeared to be permissible under federal law. That law, the Health Insurance, Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 generally allows hospitals to share data with business partners without telling patients as long as the information is used, quote, only to help the covered entity carry out its health care functions, end quote. So what does Google want to do with all of this data? Basically, it wants to design new software via artificial intelligence and machine learning to help suggest care strategies for individual patients. In other words, imagine a giant search tool to host

Starting point is 00:03:02 patient data all in one place so it can be parsed effectively. The project is being developed under Google's cloud division. And so far, Google is not charging for its efforts. Obviously, once it can use this data to work out the kinks and make a viable product, I'm sure it hopes to offer it to other health companies for a fee. Google Cloud President, Tariq Chaukat, said the company's goal for health care is centered on, quote, ultimately improving outcomes, reducing costs, and saving lives, end quote. So this is tech all over at the moment, right? On the one hand, people like to grouse all the time about how all tech seems to be good for is serving us up diversions to sell ads against our attention, right? Well, here we have a major tech player trying to solve a

Starting point is 00:03:50 major societal issue, improving health outcomes and using big tech advances ostensibly to do so. But at the same time, a lot of the knee-jerk reactions online have been, I don't like that tech companies know everything about me already, about what I browse and buy and who I know. So do I really want Google to know the results of my blood tests? What could possibly go wrong, right? And what's with this whole project being a secret? What's with patients and doctors not being informed that Google just up and took reams of health data?

Starting point is 00:04:23 And back to my opening mention of the Fitbit deal, which is... In this environment of antitrust, anti-monopoly, scrutiny was probably already a questionable acquisition. As Mike Isaac wondered on Twitter, does the revelation of Project Nightingale basically nuke that deal for sure? Instagram is debuting Reels, a TikTok-style video remix feature, which lets users make 15-second video clips set to music and then share them as stories. There will be a new section of Explorer called Top Reels, where hopefully, those videos will go viral. But one catch is, you can only test out this feature right now if you live in Brazil, quoting Josh Constine in TechCrunch. Reels leverages all of Instagram's most popular features to Frankenstein together, a remarkably coherent competitor to TikTok's rich features and

Starting point is 00:05:17 community of one and a half billion monthly users, including 122 million in the U.S., according to Censor Tower. Instead of trying to start from scratch like Facebook's lasso, Instagram could cross-pollinate Reels heavily to its own billion users. I think musically before TikTok and TikTok deserve a ton of credit for popularizing this format, admits Instagram director of product management Robbie Stein. That's nearly verbatim what Instagram founder Kevin Sistram told me about Snapchat when Instagram stories launched. Quote, they deserve all the credit, he said before copying Snapchat so ruthlessly that it stopped growing for three years. Chinese startups were always criticized for copying American companies.

Starting point is 00:06:00 companies, but Reels launch signals the grand shift to cloning in the opposite direction, end quote. Indeed, welcome to the future where lots of consumer tech innovation, especially in the social space, will be the inverse of what we've come to expect over the past 20 years. Why launch in Brazil? Brazil is a huge Instagram market. Has a very musical culture, apparently a strong creator community as well. Make no mistake, if this can get traction in Brazil, We'll see it everywhere else very shortly. Facebook has launched Facebook Pay, a new payment system that will work across Facebook proper, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It will let you shop, send money to friends, even donate money to causes.

Starting point is 00:06:50 Quoting the Verge, Facebook is planning to start rolling out Facebook pay on Messenger and Facebook in the U.S. this week. It will initially be available for fundraisers, person-to-person payments, event tickets, in-game purchases and some purchases from pages and businesses that operate on Facebook's marketplace. Quote, over time, we plan to bring Facebook pay to more people and places, including for use across Instagram and WhatsApp, explains Deborah Liu, Facebook's vice president of Marketplace and Commerce. Facebook pay will be available in the settings section of the Facebook or Messenger apps, and it will support most debit and credit cards and PayPal.

Starting point is 00:07:28 Facebook is using Stripe, PayPal, and others to process these payments, end quote. So yes, this is designed as a competitor to Apple Pay and Venmo and the like. No, I don't know why Facebook says that it's all in on Libra if it can do this. And no, I'm not sure why Facebook thinks now is the time to ask all of us to tie our credit cards and debit cards to our Facebook accounts. P.S. users have been noticing over the last 24 hours that Facebook's iOS app can apparently access the camera on your phone, even when you're doing unrelated things like scrolling through your news feed, you know, things for which the camera doesn't need to be on for. Facebook's guy Rosen tweeted that this was a bug and a fix has been submitted to the App Store

Starting point is 00:08:18 already, and that's most likely the case as no one was able to replicate this in the Android version of the app. But, you know, Facebook, am I right? If you're concerned about this, by the way, you can always revoke the app's camera and microphone permissions in the settings. Oh, and I don't know how much mileage you'll get out of this news because who uses Facebook proper anymore, other than your folks. But one of the reasons I don't use Facebook's app much anymore is because it's so friggin notification heavy. Like open up your Facebook app if you haven't done so in a day or a week or more and be prepared for like a million notifications. Oh, your uncle liked the thing about a sports team?

Starting point is 00:09:08 Facebook really, really, really wants to tell you about that. And God forbid you've ever dabbled in the Facebook marketplace. Endless notifications of things it thinks you'll want to buy. But I guess even Facebook knows it's thirsty. Because the Facebook app is rolling out a new option called Shortcuts Bar Settings that lets users remove certain tabs in the app's navigation bar and silence notification dots. Quoting Constine again,

Starting point is 00:09:36 Over the weekend, TechRunch spotted the option to remove certain tabs like Marketplace, watch groups, events, profile, friend requests, news today in, gaming and dating, or just silence their notification dots. In response to our inquiry, Facebook confirms that Shortcuts Bar Settings is now rolling out to everyone with most iOS users already equipped and the rest of Android owners getting it in the next few weeks. The move could save the sanity and improve the well-being of people who don't want their Facebook cluttered with distractions. Users already get important alerts that they could actually control via their notifications tab. Constant red notification counts on the home screen are an insidious growth hack, trying to pool in people's attention to random group feeds, event wallposts, and marketplace.

Starting point is 00:10:25 We are rolling out navigation bar controls to make it easier for people to connect with the things they like and control the notification. they get within the Facebook app. A Facebook spokesperson tells me, end quote. Harking back to Fitbit and wearables for a second, I've got an interesting raise for you. Whoop, W-H-O-O-P, is a sports tech company that makes very discreet straps with sensors embedded in them that provide a whole slew of performance metrics and other data for athletes. By discrete, I mean, these are all sensors. There's no scours. There's no scocts. screen to fiddle with. It's just something that you wear to measure what you're doing. But obviously, there's a ton of stuff that can be measured for more serious athletes, and so

Starting point is 00:11:14 whoop just closed a $55 million Series D, quoting TechCrunch. Today, the devices measure things like how much strain a workout is causing you, how you are recovering afterwards, your sleep, whether training is having the desired effect, whether you are working at a level that will be less likely to cause injury, and how you are likely to perform. form. Looking ahead, the plan is to bring the sensors into more places than just the strap it currently makes. Quote, you'll see whoop over time worn throughout your body, CEO Will Ahmed said, quote, the tech can live in other areas of the body. People will not even know you're wearing a sensor. We like the idea of tech being invisible while still being there, end quote. The funding brings the total

Starting point is 00:11:58 to over $100 million for the Boston-based company. And while Ahmed, who originally incubated the startup at Harvard, co-founder of John Capadaluppo and Aurelian Nicolay said the valuation was not being disclosed. He did describe it as healthy, which I guess is appropriate for a health tech company, end quote. From the department of, you're only getting to this now, WordPress.com sites can now accept subscriptions with a new recurring payments feature. Quoting Sarah Perez in TechCrunch, the feature is available to any of the millions of WordPress.com sites on a paid plan as well as the millions of self-hosted WordPress sites using Jetpack, the company says. It's also fairly flexible in nature. Once enabled,

Starting point is 00:12:49 WordPress.com website owners could charge for weekly newsletters, accept monthly donations, sell yearly access to exclusive content or charge for anything else where they want to be able to bill their supporters on a set schedule. WordPress.com partnered with internet payment processor stripe on the new feature, which means WordPress.com blog publishers will also need to set up a stripe account of their own before using recurring payments. Then they'll head to the earn page on WordPress.com and click on Connect Stripe to get started to be walked through the entire setup process, end quote. You can set up tiered plans, plans in different currencies, different payment frequencies than just monthly, and subscribers will be able to cancel their

Starting point is 00:13:31 subscriptions at any time via their WordPress.com account, so no separate credential issues. Finally, today's the day, at least if you live in the U.S. Disney Plus is live, and you should be able to start watching. Should, as of early this morning, people were taking to social media to report unable to connect errors as those of us on the East Coast started to wake up and try to sign up for our free trials. At around 10 a.m. Eastern, the Disney Plus help Twitter account tweeted, tweeted, quote, the consumer demand for Disney Plus has exceeded our high expectations. We are working to quickly resolve the current user issue. We appreciate your patience, end quote. In a nice Disney touch, the error message you get features Reckett Ralph and Vanelope von Schuitz.

Starting point is 00:14:26 Get it. Ralph breaks the internet. Nonetheless, hopefully Disney has a handle on this. because you got to figure that tonight will be the real crunch time when people are home and school is out and folks want to dial up some Mandalorian. Disney swears they've got this, and you got to figure the next 48 hours will be an all-hands-on-deck sort of thing. Just in August, Disney's Kevin Mayer told the Verges Julia Alexander, quote, There are always technical glitches. You can always improve the technical performance and we'll continue to do so. We haven't solved everything. I'm sure we'll find some new things.

Starting point is 00:15:01 at launch in the U.S., but you want to get out there at scale, end quote. Fingers crossed, y'all. One note, yes, the pilots for some of these brand-new shows, things like the Mandalorian and High School Musical, The Musical, The Series, should be available for you to view as soon as you're able to successfully log in, but only the pilot or the first few episodes. Don't expect to binge everything Netflix style. Disney plans to release new episodes of its various shows on Fridays at 12 a.m. Eastern Time. So guess what, West Coasters, Thursday nights at 9 p.m. is going to be the new prime time for y'all, I guess.

Starting point is 00:15:47 Maybe it'll be a rolling midnight as the dateline moves across the continent. But either way, Fridays and weekends are your new prime viewing times. Enjoy. Since I left my house this morning, until the moment that this episode drops. The temperature here in New York will have dropped something like 20 degrees. Winter is upon us, folks. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 11/12 - Google Wants Your Medical Records

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.