Facebook plots first steps into healthcare

Apple has always been a hardware company and this gives them some competitive advantages over google and facebook who can only make money by ultimately selling your information. Realistically, Google/FB probably won't monetize your health information and instead try to use it to attract you to their other services. But I trust Goog/FB less than Apple to keep my information private.

I hope Apple continues to push the privacy angle. I've seen people here on hn state that young people don't care about privacy, but that isn't what I've witnessed. My youngest relatives (grade school to early college) are privacy conscious and use services that they at least think have privacy (snapchat, for instance).

Also, friends and relatives older at retired age are also privacy conscious. The only people I know that don't seem to worry about their privacy are in their 30s and 40s.

This is a natural fit for the US, where the business of healthcare happens much closer to (and often involves) the end consumer.

In countries with universal healthcare, I think this would only work if Facebook/Google/Apple made the state provider the first choice to receive healthcare data. The state normally has programs in place already to centralise and analyse health data and what Facebook are proposing is essentially setting up equivalent functions in parallel.