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February’s Wall Street Journal report pulled back the curtain on just how much is at stake when individuals share their personal health information with health and fitness applications. Several of these apps were (perhaps unwittingly) sharing users’ personal health information via a Facebook SDK that was automatically feeding that data to the platform. In one fell swoop, multiple companies damaged trust with their users — perhaps irrevocably.

But the dangers in digital health aren’t limited to rogue SDKs; three days after the Facebook news broke, yet another large health system announced the personal information of more than 325,00 patients had been exposed. All this comes as big tech companies like Apple, IBM and Amazon begin to enter the same space, with plans for huge impact. But even these well-established names enter healthcare with a trust deficit; Rock Health’s 2018 National Consumer Health Survey found that just 11 percent of respondents said they’d be willing to share health data with tech companies.

As we move toward an increasingly digitized world of healthcare — and as early-stage companies and tech behemoths operate alongside one another in the space — how can all involved uphold their responsibilities, follow relevant laws and regulations and maintain the trust of patients and users when it comes to privacy? Companies operating under the highest standards in healthcare are expressly prohibited from monetizing users’ data; how will large tech brand names adapt their business models to act properly?

In order for the promise of digital health to be realized, companies will need to ensure their patients’ data is safe, secure and error-free. Beyond security, healthcare companies operating as providers must also maintain the confidentiality and privacy of that data. Doing so isn’t simply good practice; it’s an existential requirement for companies operating in this space. There is a baseline expectation — from users, and from employers and health plans working with digital health companies — of privacy being maintained.

The success of digital health companies will hinge on whether patients feel comfortable sharing the most intimate data they possess — their personal health information (PHI) — especially when they worry that data could impact their employment. Below are three things digital health companies would do well to keep in mind as they operate in the space.

Comply with — and inform — regulations

In 2018 alone, more than 6.1 million individuals were impacted by healthcare data breaches. Many have started to warn of the “data breach tsunami.” Complacency is no longer viable. The increasing frequency of data breaches should become a rallying cry. When it comes to PHI, protecting the privacy and security of patients and users must be a business imperative.

Complying with regulations and requirements for protecting PHI requires a combination of robust privacy and security strategies. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) sets the baseline for patient data protection. For companies operating under HIPAA, responsibilities, obligations and opportunities become crystal clear. Federal laws and regulations prescribe privacy and security minimums, as well as the exact rules governing collection, storage and transfer of participant data. For health innovators, strong privacy practices and security controls are key to customer trust and to growth.

This also means that digital health companies must be active participants in shaping the regulations that govern their operations. This isn’t a call to hire as many lobbyists as possible to water down your responsibilities; it’s a demand to educate the state and federal policymakers who will be writing the rules of the road that govern your work for the next phase of healthcare. Informed policy that enables creative iteration while putting the needs of the patient at its center is imperative for the continued success of the entire industry. This is a space where regulations can be helpful in clearly identifying what not to do to be taken seriously — and operate properly — as a digital health company.

HIPAA or not: know your role

HIPAA applies to digital health companies — whether they contract as a vendor (a “business associate”) or a healthcare provider (a “covered entity”). Third-parties, especially those that handle PHI, have the potential of exposing health companies to data breaches and non-compliance. Any data breach suffered by a healthcare company will have serious consequences, including reputational damage, government investigations and monetary damages.

Once credibility has been tarnished, it takes significant time to rebuild trust among consumers. Fundamental to this is understanding the difference between operating in technology broadly versus in digital health, and ensuring that your organization is equipped with a deep understanding of all the ins-and-outs of HIPAA and health care data; patients want to focus on getting better, not having to constantly check their privacy settings.

Keep compliance at your core

The healthcare industry is already fraught with risk. New laws and market forces only add to the complexities. In order to reach full maturity, digital health companies need to invest, early, in information security experts who understand the intersection of medical devices, software and regulations. Senior leadership teams must empower these experts while staying engaged on best practices and the latest threats. This goes against the rapid growth mindset of venture-backed companies in other industries, but is critical when it comes to healthcare.

If you are handling patient data, hiring a legal and compliance team is a top priority. By implementing a privacy and compliance program, you’ll be better equipped to find and correct potential vulnerabilities, while reducing the chance of fraud, and promoting safe and quality care.

The responsibility to establish trust in digital health is on the most prominent actors in a rapidly growing space. Data and its proper application hold the keys to the evolution of healthcare. But we must never forget that patients and users are opting to share the most intimate data they have. We must meet that responsibility with the systems, personnel and maturity it deserves.

Apple doesn’t care about news, it cares about recurring revenue. That’s why publishers are crazy to jump into bed with Apple News+. They’re rendering their own subscription options unnecessary in exchange for a sliver of what Apple pays out from the mere $10 per month it charges for unlimited reading.

The unfathomable platform risk here makes Facebook’s exploitative Instant Articles program seem toothless in comparison. On Facebook, publishers became generic providers of dumb content for the social network’s smart pipe that stole the customer relationship from content creators. But at least publishers were only giving away their free content.

Apple News+ threatens to open a massive hole in news site paywalls, allowing their best premium articles to escape. Publishers hope they’ll get exposure to new audiences. But any potential new or existing direct subscriber to a publisher will no longer be willing to pay a healthy monthly fee to occasionally access that top content while supporting the rest of the newsroom. They’ll just cherry pick what they want via News+, and Apple will shave off a few cents for the publisher while owning all the data, customer relationship, and power.

“Why subscribe to that publisher? I already pay for Apple News+” should be the question haunting journalists’ nightmares. For readers, $10 per month all-you-can-eat from 300-plus publishers sounds like a great deal today. But it could accelerate the demise of some of those outlets, leaving society with fewer watchdogs and storytellers. If publishers agree to the shake hands with the devil, the dark lord will just garner more followers, making its ruinous offer more tempting.

There are so many horrifying aspects of Apple News+ for publishers, it’s best just to list each and break them down.

No Relationship With The Reader

To succeed, publishers need attention, data, and revenue, and Apple News+ gets in the way of all three. Readers visit Apple’s app, not the outlet’s site that gives it free rein to promote conference tickets, merchandise, research reports, and other money-makers. Publishers don’t get their Apple News+ readers’ email addresses for follow-up marketing, cookies for ad targeting and content personalization, or their credit card info to speed up future purchases.

At the bottom of articles, Apple News+ recommends posts by an outlet’s competitors. Readers end up without a publisher’s bookmark in their browser toolbar, app on their phone, or even easy access to them from News+’s default tab. They won’t see the outlet’s curation that highlights its most important content, or develop a connection with its home screen layout. They’ll miss call outs to follow individual reporters and chances to interact with innovative new interactive formats.

Perhaps worst of all, publishers will be thrown right back into the coliseum of attention. They’ll need to debase their voice and amp up the sensationalism of their headlines or risk their users straying an inch over to someone else. But they’ll have no control of how they’re surfaced…

At The Mercy Of The Algorithm

Which outlets earn money on Apple News+ will be largely determined by what Apple decides to show in those first few curatorial slots on screen. At any time, Apple could decide it wants more visual photo-based content or less serious world news because it placates users even if they’re less informed. It could suddenly preference shorter takes because they keep people from bouncing out of the app, or more generic shallow-dives that won’t scare off casual readers who don’t even care about that outlet. What if Apple signs up a publisher’s biggest competitor and sends them all the attention, decimating the first outlet’s discovery while still exposing its top paywalled content for cheap access?

Remember when Facebook wanted to build the world’s personalized newspaper and delivered tons of referral traffic, then abruptly decided to favor “friends and family content” while leaving publishers to starve? Now outlets are giving Apple News+ the same iron grip on their businesses. They might hire a ton of talent to give Apple what it wants, only for the strategy to change. The Wall Street Journal says it’s hiring 50 staffers to make content specifically for Apple News+. Those sound like some of the most precarious jobs in the business right now.

Remember when Facebook got the WSJ, Guardian, and more to build “social reader apps” and then one day just shut off the virality and then shut down the whole platform? News+ revenue will be a drop in bucket of iPhone sales, and Apple could at any time decide it’s not thirsty any more and let News+ rot. That and the eventual realization of platform risk and loss of relationship with the reader led the majority of Facebook’s Instant Articles launch partners like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Vox to drop the format. Publishers would be wise to come to that same conclusion now before they drive any more eyeballs to News+.

News+ Isn’t Built For News

Apple acquired the magazine industry’s self-distribution app Texture a year ago. Now it’s trying to cram in traditional text-based news with minimal work to adapt the product. That means National Geographic and Sports Illustrated get featured billing with animated magazine covers and ways to browse the latest ‘issue’. News outlets get demoted far below, with no intuitive or productive way to skim between articles beyond swiping through a chronological stack.

I only see WSJ’s content below My Magazines, a massive At Home feature from Architectural Digest, a random Gadgets & Gear section of magazine articles, another huge call out for the new issue of The Cut plus four pieces inside of it, and one more giant look at Bloomberg’s profile of Dow Chemical. That means those magazines are likely to absorb a ton of taps and engagement time before users even make it to the WSJ, which will then only score few cents per reader.

Magazines often publish big standalone features that don’t need a ton of context. News articles are part of a continuum of information that can be laid out on a publisher’s own site where they have control but not on Apple News+. And to make articles more visually appealing, Apple strips out some of the cross-promotional recirculation, sign-up forms, and commerce opportunities depend on.

Shattered Subscriptions

The whole situation feels like the music industry stumbling into the disastrous iTunes download era. Musicians earned solid revenue when someone bought their whole physical album for $16 to listen to the single, then fell in love with the other songs and ended up buying merchandise or concert tickets. Then suddenly, fans could just buy the digital single for $0.99 from iTunes, form a bond with Apple instead of the artist, and the whole music business fell into a depression.

Apple News+’s onerous revenue sharing deal puts publishers in the same pickle. That occasional flagship article that’s a breakout success no longer serves as a tentpole for the rest of the subscription.

Formerly, people would need to pay $30 per month for a WSJ subscription to read that article, with the price covering the research, reporting, and production of the whole newspaper. Readers felt justified paying the price since the got access to the other content, and the WSJ got to keep all the money even if people didn’t read much else or declined to even visit during the month. Now someone can pop in, read the WSJ’s best or most resource-intensive article, and the publisher effectively gets paid a la carte like with an iTunes single. Publishers will be scrounging for a cut of readers’ $10 per month, which will reportedly be divided in half by Apple’s oppressive 50 percent cut, then split between all the publishers someone reads — which will be heavily skewed towards the magazines that get the spotlight.

I’ve already had friends ask why they should keep paying if most of the WSJ is in Apple News along with tons of other publishers for a third of the price. Hardcore business news addicts that want unlimited access to the finance content that’s only available for three days in Apple News+ might keep their WSJ subscription. But anyone just in it for the highlights is likely to stop paying WSJ directly or never start.

I’m personally concerned because TechCrunch has agreed to put its new Extra Crunch $15 per month subscription content inside Apple News+ despite all the warning signs. We’re saving some perks like access to conference calls just for direct Extra Crunch subscribers, and perhaps a taste of EC’s written content might convince people they want the bonus features. But even more likely seems the possibility that readers would balk at paying again for just some extra perks when they already get the rest from Apple News, and many newsrooms aren’t set up to do anything but write articles.

It’s the “good enough” strategy we see across tech products playing out in news. When Instagram first launched Stories, it lacked a ton of Snapchat’s features, but it was good enough and conveniently located where people already spent their time and had their social graph. Snapchat didn’t suddenly lose all its users, but there was little reason for new users to sign up and growth plummetted.

Apple News is pre-loaded on your device, where you already have a credit card set up, and it’s bundled with lots of content, at a cheaper price that most individual news outlets. Even if it doesn’t offer unlimited, permanent access to every WSJ Pro story, Apple News+ will be good enough. And it gets better with each outlet that allies with this Borg.

But this time, good enough won’t just determine which tech giant wins. Apple News+ could decimate the revenue of a fundamental pillar of society we rely on to hold the powerful accountable. Yet to the journalists that surrender their content, Apple will have no accountability.

Even by the standards of the often, ah, “wide-ranging” conversations on the Original Content podcast, this latest episode covers a lot of ground.

The initial focus is “Triple Frontier,” a film directed by J.C. Chandor and starring Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Pedro Pascal, Charlie Hunnam and Garrett Hedlund as friends who served in the special forces together, and who reunite to rob an infamous drug lord.

The film starts off as a relatively straightforward thriller, but in its second half, it becomes increasingly focused on the morality of these former soldiers, and even more on the mechanics of the robbery — not how you’d steal $250 million in cash, but how you’d actually get that money home.

As you probably guessed, things do not go according to plan, and we’re soon treated to multiple shots of handsome men grimly dragging duffel bags of money over the mountains. It’s an intriguing idea, even if it doesn’t quite deliver the emotional payoff that we’d hoped for.

Since we’re joined by the podcast’s original co-host Darrell Etherington, we also take some time to recap the latest season of “The Bachelor,” and to debate Netflix’s decision to test out different episode orders for the anthologies series “Love, Death & Robots,” which then leads to a discussion of a recent piece by the critic Sean T. Collins arguing that Netflix is taking a depressingly derivative and uninspired approach to TV.

And we close the episode with a spoiler-filled discussion of “The Umbrella Academy” — which we reviewed a few weeks ago, but seemed worth revisiting, now that we’ve all finished the first season.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

This morning, a publicly traded transplant diagnostics company called CareDx, along with Stanford University, sued another publicly traded genetic testing company, Natera, for patent infringement.

Much appears to be at stake and it all centers on cell-free DNA testing, a type of technology that has already been at the crux of numerous lawsuits and looks poised to play center stage again in future corporate battles.

Loosely defined, cell-free DNA (or cfDNA) technology involves blood tests that enables physicians to understand what’s happening in someone’s body. They’re not looking at his or her red or white blood cells (thus the “cell free” part) but at plasma, which carries pieces of broken-up DNA, among other things.

Companies like newly public Guardant Health are using it to try to ensure that cancer patients receive the right drugs and ultimately, they hope, detect cancer earlier than before. Prenatal cfDNA screening has meanwhile becoming a common way screen for specific chromosomal problems in a developing baby — including Down syndrome, trisomy 13 and trisomy 18. This has become particularly popular as an alternative to amniocentesis, a more intrusive, and sometimes high-risk, procedure in which a small amount of amniotic fluid is sampled from the amniotic sac surrounding a developing fetus.

Yet another way that cfDNA testing can monitor clinical conditions and make a major impact on healthcare is by distinguishing the relative proportion of DNA molecules in a patient’s blood after that person has had an organ transplant. Though traditionally, such patients have had to under biopsies to gauge whether or not their new organ was being accepted or rejected, it’s now possible to measure through the far-less traumatic process of providing blood samples. (Broadly speaking, if over time, the amount of donor DNA increases in the patient’s blood, things aren’t going well.)

It’s an important, if relatively new, development, and CareDx, a 19-year-old, Brisbane, Ca.-based company that went public in 2014, claims in its newly filed lawsuit that two patents it controls give it the exclusive right to non-invasively diagnose graft rejection in a great many organ transplant patients via cfDNA testing.  To wit, one of the patents covers “kidney transplant, a heart transplant, a liver transplant, a pancreas transplant, a lung transplant, a skin transplant, and any combination thereof.” The second patent covers the roughly 16 methods, devices, compositions and kits for diagnosing or predicting transplant status or outcome in a subject.

The patents were awarded to Stanford academics in 2014 and late 2017, respectively, including Stephen Quake, a renowned professor of bioengineering and of applied physics. Though Stanford owns the patents, however, it licenses them to CareDx, and they’ve dramatically enhanced the company’s prospects. Indeed, while its shares were priced at $10 apiece at the time of its IPO, they’ve been trading at $40 each more recently, thanks largely to its AlloSure test, which is designed specifically for kidney transplant patients (and, critically, covered by Medicare).

Indeed, CareDx’s lawsuit against 15-year-old Natera, which went public in 2015, accuses it of “preparing to develop and commercialize” a too-similar kidney transplant rejection test beginning in the middle of last year. It’s seeking  cash compensation and a court order that blocks the sale of Natera’s offering. But it’s also an offensive move, too, seemingly, given with all those other organs at stake, presumably all of which could potentially prove lucrative markets.

Natera, which counts Sequoia Capital’s Roelof Botha as a board member, did not provide management for comment on the suit. Botha also declined through a Sequoia spokesperson to comment. But Natera sent us the following statement: “We are aware that CareDx has filed suit in the United States District Court for Delaware, alleging infringement of U.S. patents Nos. 9,845,497 and 8,703,652. We are confident that we will prevail in this suit should it proceed and do not expect this suit to impact our commercialization plans or disrupt our operations in any way.  We are not surprised that CareDx would attempt to disrupt the imminent commercialization of Natera’s innovative organ transplant rejection test, which does not require donor genotyping, and will compete with CareDx’s older test. In recently published studies, Natera demonstrated superior analytical and clinical test performance.”

What happens next remains to be seen, but it’s not the first imbroglio in which Natera finds itself.  A year ago, the gene-testing company Illumina filed a lawsuit against Natera, alleging that the company’s non-invasive prenatal testing infringes a patent that Illumina controls and that relies on analysis of cell-free DNA present in maternal blood. That case is still moving toward a trial. In the meantime, Illumina last year separately won a $26.7 million jury verdict in a lawsuit accusing a subsidiary of Roche Holdings of using patented prenatal testing technology without authorization.

Last year, Natera also agreed to pay $11.4 million to settle a lawsuit with the U.S. government, after it alleged that Natera submitted false claims to several government health programs based on tips by two former Natera employees who filed an earlier whistleblower lawsuit against Natera.

Natera — whose founding CEO, Matthew Rabinowitz, stepped down from his position in January of this year, replaced by longtime Natera employee and COO Steve Chapman — denied the allegations and, as part of the settlement terms, did not admit any wrongdoing.

Either way, Natera, CareDx, and Illumina aren’t the only ones duking it out over cell-free DNA testing.

In 2017, for example, Guardant filed a lawsuit against rival Foundation Medicine, alleging that Foundation’s advertising for its own liquid and tissue tests harmed both Guardant and cancer patients by misleading oncologists about the relative accuracy and sensitivity of the competing genomic tests. Foundation later sued Guardant, alleging infringement of a patent that covers methods for analyzing a cancer patient’s tissue or blood sample to detect multiple classes of genomic alterations.

The two companies have since settled both without disclosing the terms of their agreement.

On Tuesday, the FAA and Department of Transportation published a proposal that greases the wheels for the commercial space industry, long bound by outdated regulations that were not created with a modern vision of private spaceflight in mind.

Last May, the Trump administration signaled its intention to ease commercial spaceflight regulations with Space Policy Directive 2. That directive called on Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao to “release a new regulatory system for managing launch and re-entry activity.” That system, released in draft form today seeks to pave the way for an “industry that is undergoing incredible transformation with regulations that have failed to keep up.”

With less than a year of turnaround time, the FAA and DOT produced a document detailing “Streamlined Launch and Reentry Licensing Requirements” that will govern commercial space activity. As the document states:

“This rulemaking would streamline and increase flexibility in the FAA’s commercial space launch and reentry regulations, and remove obsolete requirements. This action would consolidate and revise multiple regulatory parts and apply a single set of licensing and safety regulations across several types of operations and vehicles. The proposed rule would describe the requirements to obtain a vehicle operator license, the safety requirements, and the terms and conditions of a vehicle operator license.”

“These rules will maintain safety, simplify the licensing process, enable innovation, and reduce costs to help our country remain a leader in commercial space launches,” Chao said of the 580 page document, embedded in full below.

The new regulatory guidance comes on the same day that Vice President Mike Pence declared that U.S. astronauts must return to the moon again within the next five years “by any means necessary.” That considerably hastened schedule would upend NASA’s existing timeline for a U.S. return to the moon at 2028 at the soonest.

In Silicon Valley, investors don’t expect their portfolio companies to be profitable. “Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies,” a bible for founders, instead calls for heavy spending on growth to scale in an Amazon -like fashion.

As for Wall Street, it’s shown an affinity for stock in Jeff Bezos’ business, despite the many years it spent navigating a path to profitability, as well as other money-loosing endeavors. Why? Because it too is far less concerned with profitability than market opportunity.

Lyft, a ride-hailing company expected to go public this week, is not profitable. It posted losses of $911 million in 2018, a statistic that will make it the biggest loser amongst U.S. startups to have gone public, according to data collected by The Wall Street Journal. On the other hand, Lyft’s $2.2 billion in 2018 revenue places it atop the list of largest annual revenues for a pre-IPO business, trailing behind only Facebook and Google in that category.

Wall Street, in short, is betting on Lyft’s revenue growth, assuming it will narrow its loses and reach profitability… eventually.

Wall Street’s hungry for unicorns

Lyft, losses notwithstanding, is growing rapidly and Wall Street is paying attention. On the second day of its road show, reports emerged that its IPO was already oversubscribed. As a result, Lyft is said to have upped the cost of its stock, with new plans to raise more than $2 billion at a valuation upwards of $25 billion. That represents a revenue multiple of more than 11x, a step up multiple of more than 1.6x from its most recent private valuation of $15.1 billion and, of course, Wall Street’s insatiable desire for unicorns, profitable or not.

New data from PitchBook exploring the performance of billion-dollar-plus VC exits confirms Wall Street’s leniency toward unprofitable tech companies. Sixty-four percent of the 100+ companies valued at more than $1 billion to complete a VC-backed IPO since 2010 were unprofitable, and in 2018, money-losing startups actually fared better on the stock exchange than money-earning businesses. Moreover, U.S. tech companies that had raised more than $20 million traded up nearly 25 percent of 2018, while the S&P 500 technology sector posted flat returns.

Wall Street is still adapting to the rapid growth of the tech industry; public markets investors, therefore, are willing to deal with negative to minimal cash flows for, well, a very long time.

A tolerance for outsized exits

There’s no doubt Lyft and its much larger competitor, Uber, will go public at monstrous valuations. The two IPOs, set to create a whole bunch of millionaires and return a number of venture capital funds, will provide Silicon Valley a lesson in Wall Street’s tolerance for outsized exits.

Much like a seed-stage investor must bet on a founder’s vision, Wall Street, given a choice of several unprofitable businesses, has to bet on potential market value. Fortunately, this strategy can work quite well. Take Floodgate, for example. The seed fund invested a small amount of capital in Lyft when it was still a quirky idea for ridesharing called Zimride. Now, it boasts shares worth more than $100 million. I’m sure early shareholders in Amazon — which went public as a money-losing company in 1997 — are pretty happy, too.

Ultimately, Wall Street’s appetite for unicorns like Lyft is a result of the shortage of VC-backed IPOs. In 2006, it was the norm for a company to make its stock market debut at 7.9 years old, per PitchBook. In 2018, companies waited until the ripe age of 10.9 years, causing a significant slowdown in big liquidity events and stock sales.

Fund sizes, however, have grown larger and the proliferation of unicorns continues at unforeseen rates. That may mean, eventually, an influx of publicly shared unicorn stock. If that’s the case, might Wall Street start asking more of these startups? At the very least, public market investors, please don’t be swayed by WeWork‘s eventual stock offering and its “community adjusted EBITDA.” Silicon Valley’s pixie dust can’t be that potent.

Curious whether you should cancel your existing magazine subscription and just subscribe to Apple News+?

Apple certainly seems to believe News+ is an outsized bargain for you. The company’s claim that it would cost users $8000 to get annual access to the publications they are giving readers for $9.99 per month suggests that they see News+ giving consumers the full value of of these publications’ subscriptions.

While you may have access to most of these publication’s editorial content, due to the curated nature of the platform, it still might be a challenge for you to actually see all of these stories as you scroll and click through the app. News+ is still a great bargain for consumers, but the company has done little to transparently communicate what the service is not.

Apple and individual publications (such as ours) struck their own deals. Terms were dictated in ways that probably made publishers believe that their wouldn’t be much attrition from core subscription products, but little of that matters when consumer perceptions aren’t managed.

Apple doing little to convey what users won’t see when they open the News+ tab is unfortunate, but it’s far more detrimental to publications earnestly looking to expand their user bases, not cannibalize subscriptions. Complicated deal terms don’t make for the prettiest Keynote slides but if consumers are left to make their own assumptions, they’ll likely just assume what Apple has told them is the truth, that they are getting “full access.”

As a subscriber how are you supposed to know if your pricier Wall Street Journal digital subscription is any different from what is available on News+? Don’t look for fine print on the Apple News+ landing page, don’t look in the app itself, in fact, this information doesn’t seem to be available anywhere in Apple’s communications. The best rundown I’ve seen so far is this newsletter from CNN’s Brian Stelter, which suggests the paper is “trying to have it both ways,” letting News+ users access the full scope of the day’s content through search though much of it won’t organically surface from Apple’s curation and will only be available for a limited time. Most users signing up for News+ likely won’t realize this.

Though the minutiae of “full access” is somewhat unclear, Apple is better than most at distilling complicated deal terms into something snappy and I think it’s fair to say that non-print subscribers signing up for News+ will cancel existing subscriptions unless the reasons not to are thrown directly in their face by the publications.

Some are trying to do just that, but it’s not easy to surface caveats in the wake of a major Apple announcement.

The New Yorker’s Editor Michael Luo laid out some of the differences between what access full subscribers would be getting to the magazine’s content compared to News+ subscribers, and it seems to boil down to the fact that “most” web content isn’t included in the deal alongside some digital services like crossword puzzles.

A journalist’s thread with a dozen or so retweets won’t achieve the reach that Apple can, and the underlying points embody the frustrations that Apple seemed to implicitly suggest News+ was a total replacement for these publications’ subscriptions when they juxtaposed the massive $8000 per year slide with the $9.99 monthly price of News+.

While plenty of these publications are seemingly stuck in News+ for the time being thanks to the initial terms of the Texture acquisition (which served as the basis for Apple’s new service), for the sake of securing newcomers with more flexible terms and poaching high-profile holdouts like the New York Times, it seems that Apple to be a bit more transparent to consumers about what all this new news service is and is not.

The Federal Trade Commission, in what could be considered a prelude to new regulatory action, has issued an order to several major internet service providers requiring them to share every detail of their data collection practices. The information could expose patterns of abuse or otherwise troubling data use against which the FTC — or states — may want to take action.

The letters requesting info (detailed below) went to Comcast, Google, T-Mobile, and both the fixed and wireless sub-companies of Verizon and AT&T. These “represent a range of large and small ISPs, as well as fixed and mobile Internet providers,” an FTC spokesperson said. I’m not sure which is mean to be the small one, but welcome any information the agency can extract from any of them.

Since the Federal Communications Commission abdicated its role in enforcing consumer privacy at these ISPs when it and Congress allowed the Broadband Privacy Rule to be overturned, others have taken up the torch, notably California and even individual cities like Seattle. But for enterprises spanning the nation, national-level oversight is preferable to a patchwork approach, and so it may be that the FTC is preparing to take a stronger stance.

To be clear, the FTC already has consumer protection rules in place and could already go after an internet provider if it were found to be abusing the privacy of its users — you know, selling their location to anyone who asks or the like. (Still no action there, by the way.)

But the evolving media and telecom landscape, in which we see enormous companies devouring one another to best provide as many complementary services as possible, requires constant reevaluation. As the agency writes in a press release:

The FTC is initiating this study to better understand Internet service providers’ privacy practices in light of the evolution of telecommunications companies into vertically integrated platforms that also provide advertising-supported content.

Although the FTC is always extremely careful with its words, this statement gives a good idea of what they’re concerned about. If Verizon (our parent company’s parent company) wants to offer not just the connection you get on your phone, but the media you request, the ads you are served, and the tracking you never heard of, it needs to show that these businesses are not somehow shirking rules behind the scenes.

For instance, if Verizon Wireless says it doesn’t collect or share information about what sites you visit, but the mysterious VZ Snooping Co (fictitious, I should add) scoops all that up and then sells it for peanuts to its sister company, that could amount to a deceptive practice. Of course it’s rarely that simple (though don’t rule it out), but the only way to be sure is to comprehensively question everyone involved and carefully compare the answers with real-world practices.

How else would we catch shady zero-rating practices, zombie cookies, backdoor deals, or lip service to existing privacy laws? It takes a lot of poring over data and complaints by the detail-oriented folks at these regulatory bodies to find things out.

To that end, the letters to ISPs ask for a whole boatload of information on companies’ data practices. Here’s a summary:

• Categories of personal information collected about consumers or devices, including purposes, methods, and sources of collection
• how the data has been or is being used
• third parties that provide or are provided this data and what limitations are imposed thereupon
• how such data is combined with other types of information and how long it is retained
• internal policies and practices limiting access to this information by employees or service providers
• any privacy assessments done to evaluate associated risks and policies.
• how data is aggregated, anonymized, or deidentified (and how those terms are defined)
• how aggregated data is used, shared, etc
• “any data maps, inventories, or other charts, schematics, or graphic depictions” of information collection and storage
• total number of consumers who have “visited or otherwise viewed or interacted with” the privacy policy
• whether consumers are given any choice in collection and retention of data, and what the default choices are
• total number and percentage of users that have exercised such a choice, and what choices they made
• whether consumers are incentivized to (or threatened into) opt into data collection and how those programs work
• any process for allowing consumers to “access, correct, or delete” their personal information
• data deletion and retention policies for such information

Substantial, right?

Needless to say some of this information may not be particularly flattering to ISPs. If only 1 percent of consumers have ever chosen to share their information, for instance, that reflects badly on sharing it by default. And if data capable of being combined across categories or services to de-anonymize it, even potentially, that’s another major concern.

The FTC representative declined to comment on whether there would be any collaboration with the FCC on this endeavor, whether it was preliminary to any other action, and whether it can or will independently verify the information provided by the ISPs contacted. That’s an important point, considering how poorly these same companies represented their coverage data to the FCC for its yearly broadband deployment report. A reality check would be welcome.

You can read the rest of the letter here (PDF).

Welcome to this week’s transcribed edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley. We’re running an experiment for Extra Crunch members that puts This is Your Life in Silicon Valley in words – so you can read from wherever you are.

This is your Life in Silicon Valley was originally started by Sunil Rajaraman and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff in 2018. Rajaraman is a serial entrepreneur and writer (Co-Founded Scripted.com, and is currently an EIR at Foundation Capital), Kaykas-Wolff is the current CMO at Mozilla and ran marketing at BitTorrent. Rajaraman and Kaykas-Wolff started the podcast after a series of blog posts that Sunil wrote for The Bold Italic went viral. The goal of the podcast is to cover issues at the intersection of technology and culture – sharing a different perspective of life in the Bay Area. Their guests include entrepreneurs like Sam Lessin, journalists like Kara Swisher and Mike Isaac, politicians like Mayor Libby Schaaf and local business owners like David White of Flour + Water.

This week’s edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley features Libby Schaaf, the Mayor of Oakland. Lots of ground is covered during this interview, including Uber’s proposed move to Oakland years back and some insight as to why it fell through. We discuss the Prop C battle from the election, as well as the future of Oakland sports.

If you enjoy hearing about the future of the Bay Area and one of its major cities then this episode is for you.

For access to the full transcription, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free. 

Sunil Rajaraman:

Welcome to season three of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley, a podcast about the Bay Area, technology, and culture. I’m your host, Sunil Rajaraman, and I’m joined by my cohost, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff.

Welcome to this week’s transcribed edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley. We’re running an experiment for Extra Crunch members that puts This is Your Life in Silicon Valley in words – so you can read from wherever you are.

This is your Life in Silicon Valley was originally started by Sunil Rajaraman and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff in 2018. Rajaraman is a serial entrepreneur and writer (Co-Founded Scripted.com, and is currently an EIR at Foundation Capital), Kaykas-Wolff is the current CMO at Mozilla and ran marketing at BitTorrent. Rajaraman and Kaykas-Wolff started the podcast after a series of blog posts that Sunil wrote for The Bold Italic went viral. The goal of the podcast is to cover issues at the intersection of technology and culture – sharing a different perspective of life in the Bay Area. Their guests include entrepreneurs like Sam Lessin, journalists like Kara Swisher and Mike Isaac, politicians like Mayor Libby Schaaf and local business owners like David White of Flour + Water.

This week’s edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley features Libby Schaaf, the Mayor of Oakland. Lots of ground is covered during this interview, including Uber’s proposed move to Oakland years back and some insight as to why it fell through. We discuss the Prop C battle from the election, as well as the future of Oakland sports.

If you enjoy hearing about the future of the Bay Area and one of its major cities then this episode is for you.

For access to the full transcription, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free. 

Sunil Rajaraman:

Welcome to season three of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley, a podcast about the Bay Area, technology, and culture. I’m your host, Sunil Rajaraman, and I’m joined by my cohost, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff.