Friday, September 19, 2014

A Tale of Two Companies

The Apple Store on September 19th at 7:00am  - the line on Boylston Street is over 1000 people long to purchase an iPhone 6.



The Microsoft Store on September 19th at 10:30am  - two employees are surfing the web on a Surface RT.   The poster outside explains how Microsoft improves your iPhone.


1 comment:

Medical Quack said...

Well it shows what Tim Cook said, they are a hardware company that develops software to compliment such:) So I guess Microsoft better get busy writing some more software for Apple as people may not know they are the second largest creator of Apple software next to Apple themselves:)

I was very pleased with the privacy statements as well as I have had a number of hits on my blog from Apple about my privacy posts and when he talked about Google and the data selling/distribution business and said "there has to be some way to license some of this" I about fell off my chair as I have been trying to get a bill created and passed to just do that, license all data sellers and have them tell us what kind of data they sell and to who, won't stop it but again consumers would have a look up list.

This is a big deal and getting bigger as data brokers and who knows who else re-queries and re-packages us and you can't get to the root of where the mistakes or flaws are and you get stuck with it, been there and done that with trying to remove data. It's awful as you get rid of it once and it comes back, maybe more than once.

I even somehow enticed Acxiom to come out and briefly chat on Twitter one day, a big surprise to me but was fair and told them their data is flawed and people who read it don't understand the levels of errors or flaws and it hurts people. Now we have chronic diagnosis data items showing up on web data, i.e. people showing they have diabetes when in fact they do not. This is not clinical data but the web data stuff that is collected and that can be dangerous.

If everyone determined all this data on the web was "junk" then it wouldn't be an issue but they don't. Anyway I have been working on this for 3 years writing to the FTC, Congress and more to please pursue it as there's so many more selling data we don't even know about and the data selling epidemic for profit is getting worse, but more profits are made by banks and companies. In addition, the services also take the data and now create some kind of a "score" and sell that too based on the data they have on us in house, so double the profits maybe? Of course this too has an indirect impact on driving hackers to break into medical records too. There's a video made that exploits this and it's a wild one showing "nurse Mildred" as a character wanting to make some extra cahs. It's called Data Dealer if you want to look it up on You Tube, quite the dramatics.

Anyway, my ears tingled to hear Tim Cook say "there has to be somewhat to license all of this" when referencing Google and data distribution:) It was probably all coincidence but then again, well maybe not:)

http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2014/09/tim-cook-from-apple-talks-privacy-we.html

I do hope they stand tall on their privacy commitments as we need it. The Plus phone is a no brainer for MDs with more real estate on the screens for medical records too, a good move. Apple fully addressed the "real" world on that one.