Friday, November 15, 2019


Perhaps they appear untrustworthy? At least, lazy? Did breach-free companies out perform the market?
Companies That Experience a Data Breach Will Underperform the Stock Market Over the Long Run
Data breaches at the world’s largest corporations are becoming a commonplace affair, but are investors on Wall Street really paying attention? A new study from UK-based pro-consumer website Comparitech looked at the recent stock market performance of 28 different companies that recently suffered a massive data breach of some kind (defined as a breach impacting 1 million or more customer records), in order to see whether investors were punishing these companies for their data privacy lapses. The overall picture that emerges is that these companies underperform the stock market over the long run – but not by as much as you might think.




Suppose Google determines that people who eat product X and wear product Y never get cancer. Would that be worth sharing the data?
Google’s Totally Creepy, Totally Legal Health-Data Harvesting
… Google has gone from a basic digital reference book to a multibillion-dollar player in the health-care industry, with the potential to combine medical and search data in myriad alarming new ways. Earlier this month, it announced its $2.1 billion acquisition of the wearables company Fitbit, and suddenly the company that had logged all our late-night searches about prescriptions and symptoms would potentially also have access to our heart rates and step counts. Immediately, users voiced concern about Google combining fitness data with the sizable cache of information it keeps on its users.
Google assured detractors that it would follow all relevant privacy laws, but the regulatory-compliance discussion only distracted from the strange future coming into view. As Google pushes further into health care, it is amassing a trove of data about our shopping habits, the prescriptions we use, and where we live, and few regulations are governing how it uses these data.
… “It’s widely agreed that HIPAA is out of date, and there are efforts ongoing right now to update it for the 21st century,” says Kirsten Ostherr, a co-founder and the director of the Medical Futures Lab at Rice University. HIPAA was signed into law in 1996—years before Google knew if you were pregnant or could algorithmically estimate your risk of suicide. “Most of the kind of data [Google’s] trafficking in is not considered to be personally identifiable information in the way that it was conceived back in the ’90s, when [much of] the tech world didn’t even exist.”




They’re big, therefore they must be bad?
States’ massive Google antitrust probe will expand into search and Android businesses
Google’s parent, Alphabet, has a market capitalization of more than $900 billion, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world. Because much of its offerings are free to the user, it can be difficult to prove antitrust violations, which are typically shown by a clear impact on pricing. The Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Makan Delrahim, has indicated in public speeches that quality, innovation and other factors could be considered.




You say tomayto and I say tomahto. Ask Google, how to pronounce tomato
Google search adds pronunciation features
Google Blog: “People around the world come to Search to ask questions related to language, like looking up the definition of a word or double checking the pronunciation of a word in another language. Just this morning I’ve already searched how to define “otorhinolaryngologist” and the translation of “naranja” in Spanish to English. Now, we’re helping people pronounce tricky words and understand the meaning of those words. First, we’re launching a new experimental pronunciation feature that lets you practice word pronunciations right in Search. For the visual learners out there, we’re adding images to our English dictionary and translation features to help you better understand the meaning of a word…”



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