Technology

Several months after discreetly acquiring the online prescription service HeyDoctor, GoodRx is launching a new service based on the acquisition, GoodRx Care and offering a direct challenge to online prescription services like Hims, Hers, Nurx, Ro and others.

Already a billion-dollar giant in the world of prescription fulfillment through its cost-comparison and discount medication fulfillment business, more than 10 million consumers use the companyservices already.

With GoodRx Care, customers can use the online medical service to get a consultation, treatment, prescriptions and lab tests from doctors. The array of services on offer, which covers conditions and ailments from urinary tract infection treatments and birth control pills to erectile dysfunction medication and hair replacement supplements, mirror those pitched by white-glove online prescription services like Ro, Hims, Hers, and Nurx .

GoodRx Care services

&Over the years, we&ve helped millions of Americans find affordable solutions for their prescription medications, but have also learned that many people struggle to get to the doctor,& said Doug Hirsch, co-CEO and co-founder of GoodRx. &By introducing GoodRx Care, we aim to help fill in the gaps in care to improve access, adherence, and affordability of medical care for all Americans.&

For Hirsch and GoodRx, the expansion into these kinds of online consultations was a natural extension of the companyservices. &One third of people who come to GoodRx . are coming to GoodRx and they may not have the prescription that they don&t think they need,& he says. &For a long time now we&ve been telling people you may need a prescription for the service and telemedicine options are available.&

Now the company can keep those customers in-house by offering their own telemedicine consults.

Other technology companies are also pushing deeper into the healthcare industry with Amazon making a big splash with the launch of its employee-only healthcare service offering telemedicine and on-site consultations with staff doctors. Apple, too, has its own healthcare service for employees.

Even BestBuy is seeing big dollars in the healthcare industry. It expects healthcare services to become an increasingly important component to its bottom line as more technology hardware and software is developed to cater to both the aging population, remote health solutions, and infant and childcare.

Demand for more healthcare alternatives is only increasing even as the cost of care rises and the value of healthcare services declines.

As GoodRx notes, access to primary care physicians is hard for most Americans. Some patients can wait up to three weeks to see a doctor and therethe potential that the country could see a shortfall of up to 120,000 doctors coming within the next 15 years. Add that to the fact that over 27.5 million Americans don&t even have health insurance and the demand for low cost access to care seems obvious.

Whatless obvious is that the care Americans need is access to physicians which will prescribe hair-loss or erectile dysfunction treatments, acne treatments, eyelash growth, or metabolic assessments.

Hirsch says more services will be coming in later months. &We&re at the very early stages of telemedicine,& he says. &We want to continue to expand into more primary services as is safe and affordable and as we can.&

For now, the focus was on bringing the price point down and having more control over where to refer customers. &A lot of these services are tied to mail-order clinics and that could be hundreds of dollars [for a consultation or prescription],& Hirsch says. &We&re going to say it$20 for a visit. You can do it today… and you can have a pricing options… we&re saying you&ve had your doctor visit… herea list of prices and coupons if you want them.&

Since its launch in 2017, HeyDoctor has had over 100,000 consultations and had already been working with GoodRx, according to Hirsch. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The acquisition of HeyDoctor is the first big strategic gambit from the company in the year since it raised money from the private equity firm, Silverlake, in a transaction which valued the discount pharmaceutical provider at roughly $2.8 billion, according to a CNBC report.

&In an increasingly fragmented and confusing healthcare system, our goal is to provide a one-stop shop for services that address most basic healthcare needs,& said Hirsch.

The U.S. Department of Justice has issued a preliminary set of guidelines for how law enforcement agencies can use in their investigations genetic information from consumer DNA analysis services.

&Prosecuting violent crimes is a Department priority for many reasons, including to ensure public safety and to bring justice and closure to victims and victims& families,& said Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen, in a statement. &We cannot fulfill our mission if we cannot identify the perpetrators. Forensic genetic genealogy gets us that much closer to being able to solve the formerly unsolvable. But we must not prioritize this investigative advancement above our commitments to privacy and civil liberties; and that is why we have released our Interim Policy& to provide guidance on maintaining that crucial balance.&

Most critically the Department guidelines clearly state that a suspect &shall not be arrested based solely on a genetic association& generated by a genetic genealogical service.

If a suspect is identified using genetic information, the sample must be directly compared to the forensic profile that had already been uploaded to the FBICombined DNA Index System (called CODIS).

Genetic information from a consumer service can only be used when a case involves an unsolved violent crime or sexual offenses and the forensic sample belongs to the person investigators believe to be the perpetrator or when a case involves the remains of a suspected homicide victim, according to the Justice Department.

Prosecutors have the ability to expand or authorize the use of genetic genealogical data beyond violent crimes when law enforcement is investigating crimes that present &a substantial and ongoing threat to public safety or national security.&

Genetic data from a consumer service can only be used after investigators have searched the FBIinternal system and the collected samples that would be correlated with public information must be reviewed by a designated laboratory official, the Department of Justice said.

&The DLO must determine if the candidate forensic sample is from a single source contributor or is a deduced mixture. The DLO will also assess the candidate forensic samplesuitability (e.g., quantity, quality, degradation, mixture status, etc.),& for comparison with publicly available genetic records.

Under the new guidelines, law enforcement agencies can only search consumer genetic databases that provide explicit notifications to their users that law enforcement may use the services to investigate crimes or identify human remains. Investigators also have to receive consent from users of the genealogical service if their genetic information is going to be collected as part of an investigation (unless the consent would compromise the investigation).

These new guidelines follow a series of revelations from earlier in the year centering on the fact that DNA testing services had opened up their services to law enforcement agencies to aid in criminal investigations without their customers& knowledge or consent.

At the heart of the story was the decision by the genealogy service FamilyTreeDNA to open to law enforcement agencies the genetic records of several million customers without informing their customers. The story was first reported in January by BuzzFeed.

It wasn&t the first time that law enforcement had turned to genetic evidence to solve a crime. In April 2018, the police arrested a man believed to be the &Golden State Strangler& in part thanks to DNA evidence collected from online DNA and genealogical databases. It was the first instance of public genetic information being used to solve a crime.

The ensuing outcry over FamilyTreeDNAdecision brought new attention to the fact that the consumer genetic testing companies are largely unregulated and very few regulations exist governing how these companies can use information once a consumer has given their consent.

&We are nearing a de-facto national DNA database,& Natalie Ram, an assistant law professor at the University of Baltimore who specializes in bioethics and criminal justice, told BuzzFeed News at the time. &We don&t choose our genetic relatives, and I cannot sever my genetic relation to them. Therenothing voluntary about that.&

Technological progress has created a situation of severe tension and incompatibility between the right to privacy and the extensive data pooling on which the digital economy is based. This development requires new thinking about the substance of that right.

In the last decade, both governments and giant corporations have become data miners, collecting information about every aspect of our activities, behavior and lifestyle. New and inexpensive forms of data storage and the internet connectivity revolution — not only in content, but in fact — in just about everything (from smart appliances to nanobots inside peoplebodies) — enable the constant transmission of big data from sensors and data-collection devices to central &brains&; the artificial intelligence revolution has made it possible to analyze the masses of data gathered in this way.

The intensive collection of data and the inherent advantages of the new technology have spawned the cynical idea that privacy is dead, and we might as well just get used to that fact. In what follows, I will describe three aspects of the right to privacy that have become especially relevant in the digital world. I will then demonstrate that not only is privacy still alive and kicking, but also that we should treat it with the respect it deserves as the most important of all human rights in the digital world.

The first perspective on privacy in the digital world is the idea that the appropriate reaction to the massive pooling of data is to enhance this right, so that we all have better control over our personal information. Individuals should be able to choose what space within their personal domain can be accessed by others and to control the manner, scope and timing of its exposure.

From this perspective, and in a different and more extreme fashion than with regard to other human rights, the borders of the right to privacy allow for compromise and flexibility. Thanks to this control, I — as an individual — have the right to view the content of databases containing information about me. Furthermore, no one is allowed to make any use of this information without my consent, except in extraordinary circumstances. I retain the privilege to agree to the terms of use before I download an app onto my cell phone or began to use freeware — product categories whose economic model rests on commercializing my personal data.

This approach is reflected in the regulations requiring my consent for others to make use of and process personal data, ensure my access to data about myself and stipulate that I can have it deleted, corrected or transferred to a different company.

But there is one serious problem with this approach: It is utter fiction. It simply isn&t possible to speak about consent to violations of privacy in a world in which data is processed in many ways and for many purposes, some of which cannot be foreseen at the time when consent is granted. Furthermore, every beginning scholar of behavioral psychology will tell you that no one reads the terms of use, even when they are phrased concisely or displayed in large print — neither of which is the case, of course.

Were this not enough, there is also the psychological phenomenon of the &privacy paradox,& which refers to thediscrepancy betweenthe concept of privacy reflected in what users say (&I care deeply about my privacy&) and their actual behavior (&A free pizza? Fantastic! What information do you need?&)

The downside of the notion of privacy as control is that our control of our personal data is quite fictional. There is an overall problem — whereby commercial entities avail themselves of huge tranches of private information without having obtained real consent for doing so. This information, in turn, can be put to various uses, some of which are of value, while others pose serious threats to society.

Above all, we need to understand the limits of privacy as control. It is clear that the best approach would be to upgrade our digital literacy and learn how to deal with the situation; but the problems noted here make this idea only minimally relevant. Perhaps the solution is to start with clearer legislation — national or international — that defines reasonable and legitimate uses of personal information and mandates companies to obtain the consent of the individual involved, only when the proposed use does not fall into that category.

Somewhat paradoxically, the second approach to the right to privacy in a digital world relates to the most basic and classic connotation of the right to privacy — the &right to be left alone.& This refers to our right to preserve and protect our identity and maintain a safe and protected space around our body, thoughts, feelings, darkest secrets, lifestyle and intimate activities. A world with sensors and surveillance cameras all around us, along with recording devices and gadgets that are constantly monitoring what we do, has far-reaching psychological ramifications.

In the discourse on privacy, we tend to deal chiefly with questions of controlling the transmission or management of information after it has been collected, with regards to issues of data anonymization, security and encryption. But what we need at the present time is to ask whether there really is a commercial, business or public need to collect our private data so obsessively.

Against the clear advantages of technological progress, commercial convenience and even law enforcement, we must weigh the chilling effect on curiosity, on trust, on creativity, on intimate activity, on the ability to think outside the box — which is the critical spark to innovation.

Whatmore, the essential feature of all digital personal assistants is the human traits (voice, face, language) with which their developers have endowed them. These devices are supposed to give us the feeling that there is another human being in the room. Researchers have shown that in contrast to our behavior with what we perceive as a machine (such as a computer or telephone), we react to humanized technology as if a real person were standing there. The right to be left alone will get a whole new meaning, then, different than in the internet age.

The third approach to the right to privacy is the idea that privacy should make it impossible for commercial or government entities to combine our personal data with big data amassed from other people in order to construct precise personality, psychological and behavioral profiles through machine learning. This phenomenon, known as the &autonomy trap,& applies to information about emotional tendencies, insecurity, sexual orientation (even of persons still in the closet), fears and anxieties and more.

The problem is that the personality profile is used for retargeting advertisements of products or services or for other facets of influencing behavior — all of it in a way that is precisely tailored to the needs associated with the profile.

In a world in which it is possible to pool and analyze information about us in order to generate buying and behavior recommendations &just for you& (purchases on Amazon, shows on Netflix, navigation guides such as Waze), we in effect are unwittingly surrendering some of our decision-making autonomy to systems that know what is the best route to our destination and what we should eat.

We also are exposed to attempts at individual persuasion tailored just for us, with a power, invasiveness and capacity that did not exist in the past. Think &self-restraint preference algorithms& power devices, such as personal assistants, whose purpose is to learn as much about us as possible — what we are interested in, who our friends are, our habits, our mood — and then to help us by sending messages, making phone calls, setting appointments, ordering products or making travel reservations.

We must remember the slippery slope from the use of techniques for collecting personal information in order to offer products and services, and the use of the very same techniques to influence our thoughts, creates an autonomy trap about beliefs, and undermines our trust in democratic institutions — in brief, manipulates elections.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal in the spring of 2018 — which took the lid off the exploitation of personal data in order to sway the elections in many countries — shows that the right to privacy goes far beyond individual control of information and extends to a threat to the very possibility of conducting a sound democratic process, and thus — of protecting all human rights.

And so, in the digital world, privacy must be seen as a crucially important right for us as a society, as a collective. At the conceptual level it needs to go through the same process of evolution as its older sibling, the right to freedom of expression. Just as freedom of expression started out as the right of individuals to scream to their heartcontent, and developed into a collective right that sustains a rich and functional public discourse so that we can engage in a healthy democratic process, so too privacy must grow and develop — from the right of individuals to trade in their own data, into a collective right of defense against autonomy traps, in the context of elections and mind control.

The laws governing commercial competition will have to develop ideas that see personal data as an independent market. Antitrust agencies will have to look at the concentration of the personal data held by a single entity.

By the same token, the laws on election propaganda will have to regulate what types of personal information may not be exploited in campaigns, and determine whether there are techniques whose persuasive and manipulative powers are so great that they should be banned.

Privacy is not dead. In fact, it has become our most basic right and must be protected. Without individual privacy there is no meaning to an individuallife, and without privacy, democracy loses all meaning.