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Technology
Facebook continues to face fallout over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed how user data was stealthily obtained by way of quizzes and then appropriated for other purposes, such as targeted political advertising. Today, the U.K. Information CommissionerOffice (ICO) announced that it would be issuing the social network with its maximum fine, £500,000 ($662,000) after it concluded that it &contravened the law& — specifically the1998 Data Protection Act — &by failing to safeguard peopleinformation.&
The ICO is clear that Facebook effectively broke the law by failing to keep users data safe, when their systems allowed Dr Aleksandr Kogan, who developed an app, called &This is your digital life& on behalf of Cambridge Analytica, to scrape the data of up to 87 million Facebook users. This included accessing all of the friends data of the individual accounts that had engaged with Dr Koganapp.
The ICOinquiry first started in May 2017 in the wake of the Brexit vote and questions over how parties could have manipulated the outcome using targeted digital campaigns.
Damian Collins, the MP who is the chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee that has been undertaking the investigation, has as a result of this said that the DCMS will now demand more information from Facebook, including which other apps might have also been involved, or used in a similar way by others, as well as what potential links all of this activity might have had to Russia. Healso gearing up to demand a full, independent investigation of the company, rather than the internal audit that Facebook so far has provided. A full statement from Collins is below.
The fine, and the follow-up questions that U.K. government officials are now asking, are a signal that Facebook — after months of grilling on both sides of the Atlantic amid a wider investigation — is not yet off the hook in the U.K. This will come as good news to those who watched the hearings (and non-hearings) in Washington, London and European Parliament and felt that Facebook and others walked away relatively unscathed. The reverberations are also being felt in other parts of the world. In Australia, a group earlier today announced that it was forming a class action lawsuit against Facebook for breaching data privacy as well. (Australia has also been conducting a probe into the scandal.)
The ICO also put forward three questions alongside its announcement of the fine, which it will now be seeking answers to from Facebook. In its own words:
- Who had access to the Facebook data scraped by Dr Kogan, or any data sets derived from it
- Given Dr Kogan also worked on a project commissioned by the Russian Government through the University of St Petersburg, did anyone in Russia ever have access to this data or data sets derived from it
- Did organisations who benefited from the scraped data fail to delete it when asked to by Facebook, and if so where is it now
The DCMS committee has been conducting a wider investigation into disinformation and data use in political campaigns and it plans to publish an interim report on it later this month.
Collins& full statement:
Given that the ICO is saying that Facebook broke the law, it is essential that we now know which other apps that ran on their platform may have scraped data in a similar way. This cannot by left to a secret internal investigation at Facebook. If other developers broke the law we have a right to know, and the users whose data may have been compromised in this way should be informed.
Facebook users will be rightly concerned that the company left their data far too vulnerable to being collected without their consent by developers working on behalf of companies like CambridgeAnalytica. The number of Facebook users affected by this kind of data scraping may be far greater than has currently been acknowledged.Facebook should now make the results of their internal investigations known to the ICO, our committee and other relevant investigatory authorities.
Facebook state that they only knew about this data breach when it was first reported in the press in December 2015. The company has consistently failed to answer the questions from our committee as to who at Facebook was informed about it. They say that Mark Zuckerberg did not know about it until it was reported in the press this year. In which case, given that it concerns a breach of the law, they should state who was the most senior person in the company to know, why they decided people like Mark Zuckerberg didn&t need to know, and why they didn&t inform users at the time about the data breach. Facebook need to provide answers on these important points. These important issues would have remained hidden, were it not for people speaking out about them. Facebookresponse during our inquiry has been consistently slow and unsatisfactory.
The receivers of SCL elections should comply with the law and respond to the enforcement notice issued by the ICO. It is also disturbing that AIQ have failed to comply with their enforcement notice.
Facebook has been in the crosshairs of the ICO over other data protection issues, and not come out well.
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New technologies are often first manifested in behemoth machines that may take up entire rooms, only to be miniaturized as the technology matures. We have witnessed this shift over the last 70 years in computers, and an analogous trend is now underway in healthcare.
Startups across the world are transforming capabilities that were once relegated to specialty labs with large, expensive capital equipment and highly trained technicians. For example, in the early 2000s, Celera Genomics used nearly300 DNA sequencersand7,000 processors, and cost nearly$100 millionto complete the sequence of one human genome. Today, an entire human genome can be run on a desktop machine for less than $1,000. Beyond DNA sequencing, new companies focusing on everything from flu to strokes are moving the technology, revenue and data from a few centralized companies to the doctors and patients that need it the most.
The benefits of these technologies are numerous. Disaggregating testing from large centralized labs to the clinic or the home will broadly lower costs, enhance patient outcomes and provide better overall access to care. Historically, the capital and operational costs of this large equipment have required centralized facilities to be amortized over many samples.
This industry can now benefit from the cost reductions enabled by the mass manufacturing of consumer electronics. Optics, microfluidics and electronics are nearly an order of magnitude less expensive than just a decade ago. Combined with novel chemistry and smarter software, these tests are at cost parity or better than their centralized counterparts.
PreDxion Bio believes that it has a blood test that could cut down on deaths in emergency rooms. The team says that previous blood tests often took over three days to get back and that about half a million people die per year because of the delays. They&ve built a test that can help doctors gain insight into inflammatory biomarkers, making it easier to treat things like trauma and burns. The startup is starting clinical trials this fall at UCSF, Mayo Clinic and Mount Sinai hospitals.
Beyond the costs of the tests themselves, the fees associated with hospital-based diagnostics have grown exponentially, and many labs are overloaded with patient samples. Additional costs due to factors such as hospital administration and insurance can quickly overtake the cost of a test itself. In-clinic and in-home tests remove the overhead attributed to hospital operation, significantly reducing the overall cost of diagnostics. These tests also improve the availability, as they remove the time waiting for equipment or staff.
It is welldocumentedthat a fast and accurate diagnosis are critical for ensuring patient outcomes across a wide variety of diseases. Quicker diagnosis enables the correct rapid treatment, minimizes hospitalization rates andreduces the over-prescription of antibiotics. By bringing these tools to the bedside and reducing time to diagnosis from days to minutes, the quality of patient outcomes will increase.
In-clinic and at home tests deliver a large amount of data for both providers and patients. Traditional diagnostics produce a single data point, while distributed tests enable time series data that can help to monitor trends. This type of data is necessary to catch conditions at their earliest stages, when they are most likely to be treated and cured properly. Leveraging this data to track behaviors, treatments and outcomes can have significant impact on how healthcare is delivered. There are also additional startup opportunities to collect, analyze and act upon this data.
These tests, however, are not without their challenges. They can be expensive to develop and certify, they may require changes to clinical workflows and there is strong competition from market incumbents. Also, although these tests may be smaller and less expensive, they are still held to same rigorous standards by the FDA and other regulatory agencies. The 510(k)pathway provides a less cumbersome to pass regulatory scrutiny than a new therapeutic, but still require significant resources.
The fundamental driver of the adoption of these technologies, however, will be an optimization of economics for providers. By offering an in-clinic diagnostic test, the provider can bill the full cost of that test, rather than having to outsource it to a centralized lab. Telemedicine has been impaired by the lack of definitive tests available to patients at home. However, an over the counter flu test can enable a telemedicine company to charge for a diagnostic and therapeutic visit while the provider is still 1,000s of miles away. Each of these attributes provide increase economic benefit to both the patient and the provider.
The shift from large, centralized testing facilities, to in-clinic and at-home tests has begun. These tests provide an increased quality of care, while decreasing the costs incurred across the value-chain. Their adoption is inevitable. Significant investment is still required to develop these tests to a cost and performance acceptable to the healthcare system, and there are many sources of funding currently supporting these innovations. Many entrepreneurs have identified opportunities to make meaningful impacts across society, and entire generations to come will live longer, healthier lives because of it.
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Read more: Technology in healthcare is moving from mainframes to iPhones
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Therenothing like a great new toy to make you mourn the ghost of bygone youth. I don&t have the opportunity to try many out at this job, but when I do, therean invariable pang of jealousy for kids today who have much broader access to sophisticated playthings than we did in our day.
Nerf Laser Ops Pro is a pretty solid example of this. It finds the company combining a solid bit of nostalgic IP with some modern technology, to good effect. The new toys, which hit virtual store shelves next Monday, look like a Nerf, play likea Lazer Tag and incorporate your smartphone to help take them a step beyond what either line has offered in the past.
Arguably the most compelling bit in all of this is the price point, with none of the sets running more than $50. I have a vague memory of the original Lazer Tag system being prohibitively expensive in my youth — or maybe thatjust what my parents told me because they didn&t want any fake guns lying around the house.
There was, after all,some controversywith the line from the outset. Herea pretty depressing story from the height of Lazer Tagsuccess that no doubt caused its manufacturers to rethink the productpresentation. In 1998, the brand was purchased by Hasbro, and in 2012, it was rolled into the Nerf line.
The foam gun brand has always offered a warmer, fuzzier take on toy weapons, and thatvery much at play here. The likelihood of ever mistaking Nerf Laser Ops Pro for a real gun is slim to none. That said, true diehards will likely miss the Knight Rider-esque black and red vibe of the original product. But if thatenough to ruin your childhood, it was probably already on shaky ground to begin with.
The more important question is whether Laser Ops Pro is fun. I only played with it briefly today (reminder: I&m an adult with a job), but I can unequivocally state &yes& on that front. Habrodone a good job marrying the new with the old here. The guns are big and plasticky and hearty, combining digital technology with mechanical haptic feedback.
Smartphone use is optional,which is good for the little ones. When you add that in, however, you get the benefit of things like leaderboards, states and GPS tracking (all secure and private, the company assures me). Therealso a fun little AR shooting game you can play when you&re all by your lonesome.
The blasters will be available online July 16, with retail availability next month. They&re a solid summer purchase for parents looking for ways to get their video game-obsessed offspring up off the couch while the weatherstill nice.
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A former Apple employee who downloaded a plan for a self-driving car circuit board and booked a flight to China was arrested at the San Jose airport on July 7th. The man, Xiaolang Zhang, had made known that he was going to go work for a Chinese self-driving car startup and was bouncing with the secrets, perhaps as a bounty or shortcut.
The charges were reported earlier today by Reuters. An Apple spokesperson provided a statement to TechCrunch.
&Apple takes confidentiality and the protection of our intellectual property very seriously. We&re working with authorities on this matter and will do everything possible to make sure this individual and any other individuals involved are held accountable for their actions.&
Apple has been chiseling away at various angles on the self-driving problem for a few years now. An initial effort, project Titan, was significantly altered and some of the employees involved left Apple. Many on that project remain, though, and are working on other projects inside the company, including computer vision, mapping and AI. There are still many opportunities for Apple to be involved in self-driving, whether thatby providing a software platform or certain hardware components. Whatever they are doing itunlikely they&re happy about anyone stealing the work they&ve done so far.
Herethe filing:
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A chain of California shopping centers is sharing its license plate reader data with a well-known U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor, giving that agency the ability to track license plate numbers it captures in near real-time.
A report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed that real estate group Irvine Company shares that data with Vigilant Solutions, a private surveillance tech company that sells automated license plate recognition (ALPR) equipment to law enforcement and government agencies. Irvine Company owns nearly 50 shopping centers across California with locations in Irvine, La Jolla, Newport Beach, Redwood City, San Jose, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. ICE finalized its contract with Vigilant Solutions in January of this year.
EFF investigative researcher Dave Maass discovered Irvine Companydata-sharing activities in a page detailing its ALPR policy, a disclosure required by California law. Ironically, while Irvine CompanyALPR usage and privacy policy does describe its own practice of deleting the license data it collects once transmitted, it admits that it does in fact transmit all of it straight to Vigilant Solutions, which has no such qualms.
As Vigilant describes, the key offering in its &advanced suite& of license reading tech is unfettered access to a massive trove of license plate data:
A hallmark of Vigilantsolution, the ability for agencies to share real-time data nationwide amongst over 1,000 agencies and tap into our exclusive commercial LPR database of over 5 billion vehicle detections, sets our platform apart.
Irvine Company is only one example of this kind of data sharing, but it illustrates the ubiquity of the kind of privately owned modern surveillance technology at the fingertips of anyone willing to pay for it. While we&re likely to see more state-level legal challenges to license plate tracking technology, for now the powerful pairing of license plate numbers and location data is mostly fair game for anyone who wants to make money off collecting and aggregating it.
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Write comment (91 Comments)For the last decade, the largest technology companies have increasingly looked outside of tech to grow their operations. From automotive to retail to groceries, these companies use massive competitive advantages in the form of data, consumer relationships and software engineers to fundamentally change markets.
Now, companies like Apple and Google and Amazon are eyeing innovation across the insurance landscape. For example, Amazon is teaming with JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway to create a new way to approach health insurance, focusing first on the groupown employees. On the retail side, Amazon is selling product insurance and extended warranties at the point of sale andinvestingin insurtech startups.Meanwhile, Tesla isdevelopingan insurance product specific to the Model S. Waymo, Uber and Lyft are certainly having similar conversations internally.
Obviously, these are all preliminary steps. Insurance is a complex, multifaceted and, yes,riskybusiness. In the end, whether or not companies like Amazon become insurers themselves depends on their appetite for risk, their ability to innovate and the potential pay off.
To start, letlook at the reasons why tech giants are well-suited to upend the space.
They have direct consumer relationships
Like many businesses, a large aspect of a successful insurance business is distribution. Just look at brokers, which are a major means of distribution for insurers today — their cut can be up to 30 percent of the cost of an insurance policy. Brokers also see better margins than insurers themselves, usually around 10 percent net margins. Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google (FAAMG) possess direct relationship with billions of consumers and could, over time, disrupt the broker business.
They have deep data and analytics
The big secret in insurance is that insurers are actually terrible at using their data. Different departments (marketing, underwriting, claims) rarely work together, and their data tends to be siloed. FAAMG, on the other hand, has put data at the core of their offering; they know how to leverage analytics and AI to create better products.
Tech giants may be tempted to use their troves of data to compete with insurers directly.
They also have access to data that insurers can only dream of having: global geospatial imagery of homes, infrastructure and buildings; location, browsing and advertising data; even real-world behavioral data from smartphones and IoT devices. Combining all these signals can create a very complete picture of human behavior, interests and risk profile.
They have an army of software engineers and a monopoly of AI talent
Tech innovation has long been a challenge for insurance incumbents. Old systems are difficult to displace in any industry, but the complexity of insurance, tradition of relying on the past to predict the future and silos of data can make it a Herculean effort. Tech giants, on the other hand, regularly cannibalize their own revenue with new products and can enlist tens of thousands of engineers to develop fantastic digital customer experiences and bring large-scale efficiencies to back-end insurance systems through better software and AI.
So, yes, FAAMG has a number of major advantages over insurance incumbents. But for tech giants, new verticals and initiatives are also longer-term decisions around margins and market scope. Itan obvious point, but if FAAMG wants to jump into insurance, they&ll want a decent return. Can they find that in insurance
There are a number of reasons why it might be a tough sell.
Ultra-low margins
Average insurance net margins are 3-8 percent, and 25-30 percent gross margins, which are meager for tech standards. Software companies average around80 percentgross margins and around 15 percent net margins. Even consumer hardware like the iPhone — a costly endeavor by software standards — sees55-60 percentgross margins.
Within insurance, health tends to have the highest margins, followed by property and casualty (i.e. home and auto insurance), followed by life insurance. So if anything, healthcare is probably the closest thing to &low-hanging fruit& — but itnot exactly attractive to most companies outside insurance.
High risk
Such low margin also means that one major event can destroy a companybalance sheet for an entire fiscal year (think disasters like hurricanes, fire, flood, etc.). In addition, tech companies don&t have the historical data and actuarial scientists that insurers have spent decades building up, so they might be more prone to misjudging their overall risk exposure.
Complex administration
For insurers, evaluating and underwriting policies is an expensive endeavor. Claims, customer support and back-end are costly and complex. That said, most insurance companies are already outsourcing the development of core administration software to companies like GuideWire and Duck Creek, and then customizing the software to meet their specific needs at the last mile. So itnot as huge of a leap as it once was to think that the likes of Amazon or Google could develop similar infrastructure in-house to rival incumbent systems. Or, they could easily buy one of the development companies outright and subsume that expertise.
Amazon makes a big move
Still, the creation and underwriting of policies is something tech giants have avoided to date. Amazon has been working on warranties for certain products as an add-on to their margins — but these were backed and administered by The Warranty Group rather than Amazon itself. Before that, Amazon acted as a sales channel for SquareTradeand built up an understanding of the warranty business before diving in deeper. Tesla, as another example, announced it was selling Tesla-branded tailor-made policies for its vehicle owners, but those policies were backed by Liberty Mutual.
What role will tech giants in the U.S. play in the insurance landscape
Then, in January, Amazon made a well-publicized announcement, in tandem with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan, around its intention to create a private healthcare option for their workers. We don&t know much about the initiative, but Amazon has been working on a healthcare technology projectcodenamed 1492for some time. Rumors point to a &platform for electronic medical record data, telemedicine, and health apps.& Amazontechnology paired with Berkshire Hathawayinsurance knowledge and JPMorganfinancial expertisemakes the creation of a new health insurance entity more likely. If so, this would be a significant shot across the bow of U.S. healthcare insurers.
Of all the tech giants, it would not be a surprise if Amazon were the first to jump into insurance. Amazon has mastered the art of building massive businesses off of razor-thin margins. They&re also targeting health insurance, which presents the best margin opportunity. They can test their offering within the company first and then scale across their massive consumer base. Finally, they have a history of building out complex back-end services for their own purposes before offering it to their customers — just look at AWS.
Will other tech companies follow Amazonlead
Signs point to yes.Recently, Googlesister company, Verily, &has been in talks with insurers about jointly bidding for contracts that would involve taking on risk for hundreds of thousands of patients.& In addition, Applewill be openinganetworkof medical clinics for its employees.
It may not stop at health insurance. Thereno question technology is changing human behavior and society, and as the developers of much of this new tech, FAAMG will inevitably be pushed closer to other sectors of insurance, as well, including home and auto.
Autonomous vehicle fleets will make companies like Tesla, Google and Uber the owners of tens of thousands of cars, subjecting them to the risk that comes with that. Meanwhile, IoT hardware and accompanying services are bringing tech giants into the living room. Thata literal statement when it comes to Amazon Key. Nest, Google Home and Amazon Echo are more innocuous, but provide all sorts of data about whatgoing on inside the home and could, someday, help inform the creation of real-time home insurance policies.
East Asia as a leading indicator
It also can be instructive to look at markets outside the U.S. In East Asia, businesses are taking amore aggressive posturevis-à-vis insurance.Baidu,Alibaba,Rakuten,Tencent andLINEhave all shown some level of appetite for offering their own insurance products. These companies can verify identities, enforce trust and access the behavioral and financial data necessary to provide better policies than many insurance incumbents in those countries.
They also are exploring new ways of looking at risk and changing user behavior: TencentWeSure is paying users to stay healthy bywalking more, while Yongqianbao, a lending company, tracks unconventional digital data to determine credit risk, such as phone brand (iPhone users are less likely to default) and whether they let their phone batteries run down.
Still, the question remains: What role will tech giants in the U.S. play in the insurance landscape Will they act as a channel for existing insurers, as a provider of data and analytics to those insurers or even as a provider of direct insurance themselves
Insurance may not be lucrative-enough for tech giants in the short-term, but as real-time data and analytics are used to create insurance policies, tech giants may be tempted to use their troves of data to compete with insurers directly. Until then, we can expect insurers and tech giants to form alliances, as they have in East Asia, with tech companies using insurance and warranties as a value-add for their customers, and insurers using tech companies as a sales channel. Regardless, the story of FAAMG (and others) in insurance is undoubtedly just getting started, and we&ll have to check back in as the landscape develops.
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Read more: Is insurance a rich enough game to disrupt
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