Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

Horrified to find I am mostly agreeing with the pony-tailed one.

With CareZone, why not just use Google Docs or some other service and share it with your babysitter, your nurse, your hospice program?

Schwartz: People keep information in Dropbox, they keep it in Evernote, in Google Docs, in Microsoft Excel, they keep it in e-mail. The point is they keep it all over the place. What we do is provide you with a purpose-built environment oriented for this. If you want to keep a journal, a set of private notes or public notes, documents, medicines, contacts, and have them securely shared in an ad-free environment that’s totally private and walled off, that’s what we provide.

Ad-free and walled off? So do you think you’ll be more impervious to some of the unpleasant side effects of running an online business, like advertising?

Schwartz: Inevitably if you’re in the world of social media, you have this conundrum to deal with, which is that privacy is anti-revenue. The more private Facebook is, the lower their revenue it gets, because Facebook gets money by selling access to you to advertisers. That’s neither good nor bad, but it’s a different model than I want to pursue with my parents or with my children. I want that to be in a private place where I control who’s got access.

via Jonathan Schwartz: Oracle bungled its chance at mobile Java | Internet & Media – CNET News.

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Comments

4 responses to “Horrified to find I am mostly agreeing with the pony-tailed one.”

  1. David

    I’m pretty sure I’m not going to agree with My LIttle Pony on anything.

    Reply
  2. Dave Walker

    I’m surprised to see he’s pretty much nailed the conundrum that Facebook faces with regard to security and privacy; and rather pithily, too.

    Speaking of Facebook, something interesting crossed my mind in the wee, small and far too hot hours of this morning….

    Google did A Good Thing in producing appliances that people could bolt into their intranets so that, although these networks were segregated from the Internet, they could still benefit from a Google search capability.

    Various stories have popped up over the last few years about “Facebook for X” where “X” is “some large, geographically dispersed community of people who, for whatever reasons, can’t use actual Facebook freely”. “Spooks” is the usual press term ;-).

    There’s now a bunch of companies who are producing stuff to fill that demand. Seeing as Facebook now has about as much money per employee as Croesus (stock ding notwithstanding), could they build a set of private Facebooks to order, for these people? Or, as I suspect may be the case, is the Facebook codebase too much of a hairball for that?

    Reply
    1. alecm

      My suspicion is they’re not interested in that because FB is not a platform for users, it’s a lure for eyeballs to see adverts. Always has been.

      People who want secure in-house social platforms should talk to Surevine. 🙂

      Reply
  3. Dave Walker

    Indeed, should MLP decide to take CareZone international, he might even find he has a market in the UK, if he cosies-up to a UK-hosting infrastructure provider.

    Unless the NHS gets a significant clue injection regarding its proposals for patient record management, people who care about record privacy are going to be looking for somewhere else to host them – and for people who don’t have their own infrastructure to hand, there’s a gap in the market until telcos implement unproxied IPv6 to ‘phones and ‘phone vendors put server capabilities in handsets.

    Reply

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