Google: "We want to scan your body with our amazing new technology and possibly add 20 years to your life!"
Haters: "No thanks, way too intrusive. I don't want you tracking me/selling my data/showing me ads."
Haters: "No thanks, way too intrusive. I don't want you tracking me/selling my data/showing me ads."
Why is anyone cynical of such an activity deemed a "hater"? Because they don't conform and align with your own views on the subject?
Why not go on step further into common internet vitriol and just label them "trolls" for said disagreement?
I've no issue with Google producing such a product and me buying it, even at a relatively high cost, if the benefits are there. What I don't want is to pay a significant chunk of money for said product AND still have to hand over biochemical data to Google, an advertising firm, to use the thing.
Looks like about $180 per year at the moment:
http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/intelligence/2014/0...
You see Google as a company that is just serving ads.
I see Google as a company collecting and organizing information.
Should companies not do things beyond what they are doing right now even if it means improving people's lives?
It's not Google's fault, but more the U.S. Government for being incapable to reign in control of certain organizations.
Personally I don't care - from a data perspective I'm know I'm not a special snowflake, but for others I can understand their stress.
If you'd like to read further, The Innovator's Dilemma and related material has a lot of examples of companies where inertia around existing lines of revenue was strong enough to kill them.
But it's deeper than that. It's only obvious because those companies had their markets shift under them. I think the same sort of inertia is endemic, but it only becomes visible when circumstances change. E.g., look at the number of newspaper companies that existed before 1994, and look at how many are thriving today.
Google's not immune to this. Whatever wonders they come up with, the company is stuffed with people who are very good at selling their users (that is, us) to their customers (the advertisers). It's entirely reasonable to fear what those people will do with my medical data.
You can see it however you want. The truth can be found by asking a simple question: how does Google make money? By serving ads. They may collect and organize information in the process, but ultimately they are an advertising company.
I'm on the fence about this detector. On the one hand, yes, there are significant benefits. On the other hand, the costs are also monumental. One has to cast their fanboy/hater hat aside and weigh these pros and cons carefully and objectively before making a decision.
...and then making it hard to access on Windows Phone.
I would do it because their interests are aligned with mine: they want me to live a lot longer so I can do a lot more searches and view more youtube videos etc, and so do I. Our reasons for wanting me to live longer are different, but they get their benefit and I get mine, fair trade.
I'm not suggesting Google would or even legally could consider creating a bidding system for insurance companies to use clean scans as a leadgen system, but in the unlikely event that they did feel so inclined, it wouldn't exactly be a wild departure from their business model
I wonder what the actuaries think of this product.
Every person here won that lottery ticket, when we could have just as easily suffered from any number of horrible diseases and disorders. Not wanting to pay higher premiums b/c the "lotto losers" are included is like not wanting to pay for a lotto ticket after the fact because you know the rare outcome won't hit you.
This is a depressingly pessimistic way of ignoring the real underlying problem: health care is too fucking expensive.
2019: Apple (January) and later Microsoft (October) respond with their own health scanners. Integrating with their respective data silos on personal health data, only people with iPhones or Windows Phones can be screened at an Apple Store Clinic or Windows You location.
2025: A federal case reveals that Google's initial scanner, in an attempt to reduce false positives, left millions with false confidence in their health. Google settles and introduces a subscription plan.
2027: Leaked emails, photographs, and a misconfigured Hangout that was broadcast live on YouTube show decisively that Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle are colluding to keep wages low for the medical staff they employ. Oracle doesn't even have any medical staff, it just wanted in on the collusion. The federal government reacts by saying "These people have our medical results now and we're not going near this with a ten-foot pole."
2030: Google announces Nexus Implant, a biometric device that relays data in real-time to Google. This is lauded by the CDC as a major help in combating epidemics. Apple launches iMe later that year. Microsoft released a biometric implant in 2004, but it was derided as "too clunky." Surface You comes out in 2032.
2031: For the 2031 flu season, biometrics users are advised to upgrade to a version with vaccination pods. Capable of being intelligently released if it detects you are exposed to a specific flu strain, this enables the immunocompromised to be "just-in-time vaccinated". Thanks to the tracking data reported back from the implants, flu is at an all-time low.
2033: Massive vulnerabilities rock the now ludicrously decrepit but still used X.509 CA infrastructure. Nobody discusses leaving X.509.
2034: First jailbreak exploits for iMe released, allowing users to circumvent the trusted computing chip on the iMe and load custom firmware. This is initially used by biohackers looking to access raw sensor data.
Spring 2035: Unrest in Bahrain turns coldly bloody as the regime infects anyone with an iMe, Nexus Implant, or Surface Inside with acute vaccination sickness, caused by firing all vaccination pods simultaneously (all implants are now pre-loaded with vaccinations for common infections). A postmortem of the attack determines that the Bahrainian national CA deployed an exploit similar to the jailbreak to issue rogue commands to the vaccination units.
Fall 2035: Protestors in China, Russia and the Ukraine keel over, eyes bleeding, as a custom-made virus is released from backdoored implants. Google defends placing the kill-switches as a cost of doing business in accordance with foreign law in foreign countries.
Winter 2035: As tensions run high during a trade dispute between China, Greater Korea, and Malaysia, rouge cyberattackers kill thousands of people using unpatched implants. Calls increase for implants to be recalled, but the flu season looks to be the worst in a long time, and critics say superbugs caused by on-demand antibiotics use via the CleanU app (YC 2033) could be more fatal than the unpatched implants. After heavy lobbying, Google supports Android Z for the Nexus Implant.
Spring 2036: The trade dispute worsens, and after a misstep on the part of a US mediator, a cyberattack from "patriotic Chinese citizens" kills several local, state, and federal government workers and politicians. Presidential hopeful Chris Schwarzenegger is killed. The United States demands sanctions on China, alleging the attack to have originating from PLA-controlled networks. Both countries enter into an economic death spiral as they try to disentangle their economies. A SpaceX launch is misinterpreted by a Chinese early-warning system as a nuclear launch and, fearing annihilation, the PRC unleashes its now-substantial nuclear arsenal on America and NATO. Russia interprets Ukraine-bound missiles as attacks on its soil and, confused by the stealth signatures, fires on NATO as well. The United Kingdom is destroyed instantaneously. This escalates to a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, New Rhodesia, and France. The world is a smoking ruin. As the radiation slowly declines over the next few million years, the wasteland left behind is left to the lichen.
Moral of the story? Stay away from Google's medical initiatives.
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligen...
> Around 2002 I attended a small party for Google—before its IPO, when it only focused on search. I struck up a conversation with Larry Page, Google's brilliant cofounder, who became the company's CEO in 2011. “Larry, I still don't get it. There are so many search companies. Web search, for free? Where does that get you?” My unimaginative blindness is solid evidence that predicting is hard, especially about the future, but in my defense this was before Google had ramped up its ad-auction scheme to generate real income, long before YouTube or any other major acquisitions. I was not the only avid user of its search site who thought it would not last long.
> But Page's reply has always stuck with me: “Oh, we're really making an AI.”
Seeing projects like this only affirm what I've generally felt about Google. They don't build stuff to sell ads. They sell ads to do cool stuff like this.
Which of these actions are about making an AI?
Most of the Google search page area is now occupied by ads, or ads disguised as content
http://searchengineland.com/google-results-too-ad-heavy-1662...
Decreasing contrast in the background of ads, this especially hurts older people as ability to see contrast decreases with age, and the FTC found that almost half the people fail to notice that there are ads on the page, thus forcing products that are first in the organic results to pay Google for ads.
http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-itor-maybe-not/
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentional...
http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/ftc-googles-ad-practice-i...
Tracking the emails in the free Google Apps for Education and even paid Google Apps for Business to build ad profiles, making misleading statements to the public that they're not doing so, and then when it finally came to having to make statements to federal court, having to tell the truth about it and then claiming the consumer Gmail policy applied to Apps for Education data.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht...
Paid inclusion for shopping search results
http://marketingland.com/once-deemed-evil-google-now-embrace...
Ranking Google+ reviews over Yelp results even if the user explicitly searches for Yelp
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-complains-outranked-...
Conspiring to kill SkyHook(and succeeding) with its 500lb outsized influence like Microsoft used to.
http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-la...
Getting fined by FTC for violating Gmail users privacy by exposing their friends lists in Google Buzz in order to compete with Twitter http://www.netcompetition.org/antitrust/why-ftcs-22-5m-googl...
Tracking the physical location of Android phones for ad purposes without properly informing users and disabling things like Google Now if you disable the tracking.
http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/
Google employee accesses personal information of others. Google says it has fixed the issue, but how do we even know? Is there any legal safeguard against someone at Google reading your email?
http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...
Tying Android App store to having Google search engine as default on Android, ensuring that alternative search engines cannot be shipped as default.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/02/12/documents-shed-light-...
Stopping Acer from shipping Aliyun OS by threatening to pull the Play Store and Android beta access. Bonus points for enforcing this by the duplicitous moniker 'Open Handset Alliance' doublespeak
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/report-google-threate...
Making people literally cry with the forced Google+ integration into Youtube and making confusing UX to make people share more than they want to, in order to compete with Facebook.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs (warning, NSFW language)
Extracting petty revenge on CNET for googling(!) information on its CEO
http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/
Convicted in the courts for colluding with other tech firms in illegal non-poaching agreements
http://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-...
Well, I burst out laughing when I read this. They've been trying for 12 years and haven't managed major publishable advancements in AGI?
I mean, they did establish the annual AGI conference in 2005... so that's something.
Another part of me is saying: "Shut up and tell me if I have cancer".
Which promotes those who can pay the most to advertise, not the best in their field or even a given user's area/feasible options.
"We will license it out and the partners will take it forward to doctors and patients."
Haters: "No thanks, way to intrusive. I don't want you tracking me.
"I want to give you this scan that might add a year to your life, for free! Isn't that awesome! Aren't I the coolest person in the world?"
"What do you get out of it?"
"Total access to your physical records, which may be shared with the feds based on an NSL, intercepted by various foreign governments without our knowledge (including our own government), sold on the open market by a bad employee, or just farmed out to advertisers in exchange for a buck."
"Ah. Er. What part of that was you being awesome again?"
ADD: Don't get me wrong; this is probably truly awesome. Could save hundreds of thousands of lives. Just don't blow smoke up my ass and tell me it doesn't come without a cost, it's costing all of us bit-by-bit. The bill is adding up.
And they'll call it "fair", because that word does not mean what it used to, at all. Fair use. Fair treatment.
Fair division of the equity of your being between the vultures.
Not that it's wrong though. Imagine if you said the same thing about fire insurance. That it was unfair that they were allowed to set higher premiums on wooden buildings. Or a better analogy, if the fire insurance companies wanted to come into the building and inspect the materials, foundation, the wiring, if the fire alarms worked, etc.
... yet. But even now, nothing prevents Google from selling personal data to established insurance players.
Just because it's "not allowed" doesn't mean it doesn't currently and won't in the future happen. They'll always find a way.
By having greater knowledge about your prospective customer, you can better anticipate the probability and magnitude of any potential claim, and thereby adjust premiums accordingly, or simply refuse insurance as the prospect is likely to be either unprofitable or an active drain to the insurer.
So - this is absolutely aligned with the interests of the insurance industry - not of the consumer, no, but insurance never was aligned with their interests - were it, it would not exist.