I’ve been meaning to blog about my role as CEO of Hospify for a while now, and the events of the last week or two have convinced me that now’s the time to do it. The exposé of the data abuse conducted by Cambridge Analytica, and its impact on the business models underpinning Facebook in particular but also Google, YouTube and many other digital businesses have underlined the reasons that we founded company in the first place.
I’m often asked what a journalist is doing running a health chat company, and the Cambridge Analytica story allows me to answer that question very neatly. Besides being a writer, I’d always had a strong interest in technology and like many proto-geeks of my generation did a lot of coding as a teenager thanks to the advent of home computers like the ZX81 and BBC Micro.
I got my first career break — an editorial position on Wired UK back in the mid-nineties — by combining these two interests, and although my career has ranged fairly widely since, these two things have always remained close to the heart of everything I’ve done.
After Wired I worked at the BBC for a period, building an early social network based around a TV drama. When that project was killed by the September 11th attacks (long story) I migrated to the Telegraph, where I looked after, by turns, online digital development, online video, and the Telegraph Weekly World Edition newspaper — for which I also built a social network, this time for British Expats.
My career has, therefore, always been about both content and its expression, “expression” at this particular period in history meaning the internet, the web, social media, and — latterly — mobile, which combines all these things in the almost magical devices that billions of us carry with us everywhere, all the time, and use to mediate all aspects of our lives.
I was at the Telegraph long enough to earn a coveted window seat, and when I looked out of that window what I saw was Google, whose offices were right across the street from mine. Because every time I looked at my computer I saw Google too, it followed that I should spend quite a bit of time in those offices, which I did, generally discussing the finer details of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), then in its infancy but still of considerable importance to a newspaper group.
While the Telegraph initially did well out of the web, as time went by that success began to wane. This was partly as the result of poor strategic decisions by senior management (don’t get me started), but also because the media as a whole and newspapers in particular were being reconfigured by the exponential expansion of Google, Facebook and others, especially as the world began the shift from the desktop to the phone.
Sitting in that window seat between 2009 and 2012, it became ever more apparent to me that content was becoming increasingly commodified and that I should put more focus on the expression side of my equation if I wanted to stay remotely relevant. It also became clear to me that this data pact that consumers — and, indeed, the newspapers, themselves — were making with the new tech giants by handing over detailed information about their personalities and habits in return for “free” online services was deeply problematic, not least because of the effect it was having on the economics of my own industry, which I witnessed in a very literal way as month after month more of the excellent journalists who sat all around me got laid off. But it was a new world, everyone wanted to try it out for size, and the services were so good that no one really seemed to care.
Still, I felt that change was coming one way or another, so when the cutbacks reduced my own team to the point where I felt we could no longer put out a quality product, I left the Telegraph to focus more on online video. When that didn’t work out (another long story) I was contacted by two surgeons, one of whom I’d known since university, and ask to bring my media tech experience to bear on an idea they’d had for improving comms in health.
I didn’t know too much about healthcare as an industry, but my undergrad degree was in experimental psychology and I’d just spent a decade helping my father through an extended battle with chronic lymphatic leukaemia, so the area wasn’t completely alien to me. I did some research and it was soon obvious to me that not only could the kind of consumer messaging and social media tools provided by the likes of Facebook and the companies it had acquired — notably WhatsApp and Instagram — make a huge difference to efficiency in the provision of healthcare, but that here was an area where, however blasé they were in other areas of their lives, people really would care about what happened to their data.
I therefore threw my lot in with the surgeons, Neville Dastur and Charles Nduka. We talked to the Information Commissioner’s Office, looked at the data protection legislation in health, did a lot of market testing, reviewed the General Data Protection Regulation that was due to come down the line from Europe (and is due to arrive on May 25th), and built a service with an innovative, data compliant architecture for handling chat and data that provided both with best practice, transparency and simplicity for users and employers — without being funded by sharing personal information or serving ads.
For much of the three years it took us to do this, most people we spoke to told us we were wasting our time, that the service wasn’t necessary, that people didn’t care, that the big companies would surely beat us to it. But our service went live in the Apple and Android app stores in February, and a few weeks later we’ve seen $50bn wiped off the value of Facebook as the extent of the data misuse enabled by its service has become incontrovertibly obvious to everyone.
In the meantime, Hospify is being all but overwhelmed with enquiries from clinicians, Trusts, unions and chief information officers, app downloads are increasing every day, and several of the big companies that were perceived as such a threat are now instead in the midst of legal, political and cultural firestorms over the chaos that their lax attitudes to handling data have ignited.
Into this mess rides GDPR, which is looking extraordinarily relevant all of a sudden. It’s true, of course, that regulation doesn’t change things on its own. The Equal Pay Act of 1970 years ago demonstrates that. It’s only now that the #metoo movement has amplified the frustration of women sufficiently (thanks to social media for once acting in the way it was supposed to) that we’re seeing companies opening up their books on the gender pay gap, and change is actually starting to happen.
So it goes with data privacy. GDPR on its own could easily be in large part ignored. But when week after week we’re hearing about the awful implications of not taking due care over data, revelations that are coming out as a result of the tireless work of reporters such as the Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr, who I’m proud to say that I know from my time as journalist (and who deserves to pick up a slew of awards for her efforts), we’re seeing not just regulatory change, but culture change too. And the combination is all but unstoppable.
We are therefore, I believe, about to enter a new era of data compliance. It’s the era we built Hospify for. Yes, it’s taken a while, but good things take time. Unlike Mark Zuckerberg, who extolled his team to move fast and break things until, alas, they ended up breaking democracy, Hospify’s approach is somewhat more measured. “Move slow and fix things” pretty much sums it up. This is not advertising we’re talking about. It’s health. Mistakes have very real consequences, for very real people. You can’t muck about it with it. It really is life and death.
So join us! Change will ultimately only come if you, the user, demand it, and choose the tools that help you to enact it. Be the change you want to see in the world, as we have tried to do. Hospify is just one of many other great tools coming through that put data compliance and privacy at the heart of everything they do. Seek them out, use them, tell your friends about them. Because information might want to be free — to quote the Wired axiom from my old dotcom days — but as is now abundantly clear, someone always ends up paying.