Stay connected, stay informed - protect your privacy.

Unless you have been living under a rock, the recent woes experienced  by tech and social media giant Facebook have dominated news cycles on  days when chemical weapons, nuclear proliferation, and North Korean  summits might otherwise capture the attention of the American  consciousness. The headline:

Facebook Doesn’t Care About Users’ Privacy
(and they probably never did).

In fact, they misappropriated the personal data of more than 85 million citizens, and then took a couple of years to admit it.

The blunder has not gone unnoticed by other tech titans. On a  Saturday afternoon Apple CEO, Tim Cook, at March’s Beijing China  Development Forum, offered his hot take on the situation at hand and how  data affects human lives:

“This certain situation is so dire and has become so large that  probably some well-crafted regulation is necessary. The ability of  anyone to know what you’ve been browsing about for years, who your  contacts are, who their contacts are, things you like and dislike, and  every intimate detail of your life; from my own point of view, it  shouldn’t exist.”

Needless to say, Zuckerberg has taken a beating; so too has Facebook  shares, suffering a precipitous drop of 4.4% since the unveiling of the  Cambridge Analytica scandal. While Facebook users are now looking more  closely at their app settings, there has been a noticeable exodus from  the platform for many users. Millennials were less enthralled with  Facebook than the newer social media platforms like Instagram (also  owned by Facebook) and SnapChat, so a loss of active users as a result  of these privacy concerns are a black eye on, arguably, the world’s most  visible social media platform. And it is costing them money in not only  market value, but also ad sales.

  Ransomware attacks are among the most serious and prevalent threats  for data. Ransomware is best understood as a type of malicious software  that intends to either publish of block access to information until a  “ransom” is paid. While ransomware attacks have increased in complexity,  and the ability to reverse them along with it, encrypting files and  making them inaccessible until the ransom payment provides real problems  for organizations that store massive amounts of personal data. One of the latest attacks was on Rochester-based (Minnesota)  Associates in Psychiatry and Psychology (APP) on March 31, 2018. The  ransomware attack affected patient information for 6,546 individuals;  thus far, it appears that the information was not in a “human-readable”  format and that the protected health information wasn’t accessed or  copied by the attackers.
Ransomware attacks like this speak to the need for information  governance and vital records programs. While there isn’t an exhaustive  list of information potentially accessed, it likely included:

• Names
• Birthdates
• Addresses
• Social Security numbers
• Insurance information
• Treatment records

APP had a prompt response to the attack, taking their systems  offline. Doing so in a timely manner likely stopped the spread of the  attack and limited possible encryption of personal data and data theft,  completing the “ransom” aspect of the ransomware attack.

Elon Musk and Tesla were in the news once more. Recent tweets about  taking the company private with secured funds sparked some  head-scratching and questions about what implications a tweet might have  if deemed as a false statement in the pursuit of increasing the worth  of Tesla.

Public tweets by principals of publicly-traded companies about  finances pose interesting questions regarding compliance. Does sharing  information about bankruptcy or the funds necessary to take a company  private constitute some kind of breach in the eyes of the SEC? That  remains to be seen, as they have been mum on the topic thus far.  However, were Musk or Tesla unwilling, or unable, to provide regulatory  filings that outline a deal that would allow them to go private, it  poses a quandary for how compliance regulation is carried out in this  ever-evolving business landscape.

Either way, we bet a lot of folks are wishing they had some Tesla stock right about now. 

News of this privacy breach comes in the wake of the outing of  Cambridge Analytica and the role they may have had in  politically-oriented ads. To hear Facebook speak about it publicly, they  have been trying to combat the rise of fake news (despite famously  denying they played any role in the election).

Ungoverned, false information that lingered because of the clicks it  created, and not whether or not the story has been appropriately sourced  and verified, is the primary cause of the rise of fake news that  plagued Facebook and spilled out into casual conversations. Fake news is  best understood in the context of giving oxygen to an idea regardless  of its veracity: such stories were likely accelerated and allowed to  fester as a result of these ineffective fact-checking efforts. Without  access to the results of these third-party editors, we cannot understand  the effect in its totality.

You might be wondering why we can’t apply more pressure to turn over  the data or at least share the full results. The reason will irritate  you. We can’t do much about it is because, as a private corporation,  they are not obligated to release data. That is why GDPR-like  legislation is being proposed in the U.S. on a state and national level.  Facebook claims that in not revealing this internal data, they don’t  risk revealing private user data––which is hypocritical at best, given  what we know now about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Can we genuinely believe that Facebook is really prioritizing privacy as their new
ads suggest?l.

In November 1999, as the rest the United States dealt with the  cultural and cult-prophetic aspects of Y2K, the Institutes of Medicine  published a report titled: To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health  System. The report began with these alarming words, “As many as 98,000  people die in hospitals each year as a result of medical errors that  could have been prevented.” Reading that people die because of human  error in the very places that should be curing us is quite jarring. The  reality is that humans do make errors. Even in life and death  situations, humans cannot escape their “humanness.”

This basic human condition was an underlying point of the report.  Standing on its own, To Err is Human was also a call to arms. It is  probably not a coincidence that building a safer American health system  would have been visionary in 1999. After all, this was a time of  uncertainty. The dot-com bubble had burst, and the “end of the world”  dogma surrounding Y2K was at its peak. So many Americans felt that the  end was near. However, at the close of the twentieth century, some  computer scientists saw the benefits of electronic information to the  healthcare industry. Although most of the now famous To Err is Human  report focused on human-caused errors, the report also listed how and  what computers could do to help humans make less mistakes.

Without actually saying it, To Err is Human can be considered an early attempt at conceptualizing potential IG  principles that would reduce fatal medical errors. Donaldson, Corrigan  & Kohn (2000) promoted a “system-oriented approach” that “involves a  cycle of anticipating problems” and “tracking and analyzing data as  errors and near misses occur.” The identified data could then be used  inside the system to “modify processes to prevent further occurrences.”  However, it was not the U.S. that first promoted IG in healthcare;  instead, it was the U.K.’s National Health Service that introduced the  NHS IG Toolkit to its professionals in 2002-2003.

Analytics  is becoming a competitive edge for organizations. Once being a  “nice-to-have,” applying analytics is now becoming mission-critical.

An August 6, 2009, New York Times article titled, “For Today’s  Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics”[1] reminds me of the famous quote  of advice to Dustin Hoffman’s character in his career breakthrough  movie, The Graduate. It occurs when a self-righteous Los Angeles  businessman takes aside the baby-faced Benjamin Braddock, played by  Hoffman, and declares, “I just want to say one word to you—just one  word—‘plastics.’” Perhaps a remake of this movie will be made and  updated with the word “analytics” substituted for plastics.

The use of analytics (that include statistics) is a skill gaining  mainstream value due to the increasingly thinner margin for decision  error. There is a requirement to gain insights and inferences from the  treasure chest of raw transactional data that so many organizations have  now stored (and are continuing to store) in a digital format.  Organizations are drowning in data, but starving for information.

“The application of analytics is becoming commonly accepted, but will senior executives realize it?”

The application of analytics is becoming commonly accepted, but will senior executives realize it?
How do executives and managers mature in applying accepted methods?
Managers today are maturing in applying progressive managerial methods.  Consider this. Roughly 50 years ago, CEOs hired accountants to do the  financial analysis of a company, because this was too complex for them  to fully grasp. Today, all CEOs and mainstream businesspeople know what  price-earnings (PE) ratios and cash flow statements are, and that they  are essential to interpreting a business’ financial health. They would  not survive or get the job without this knowledge.

Twenty years ago, CEOs of companies didn’t have computers on their  desks. They didn’t have the time or skill to operate these complex  machines and applications, so they had their secretaries and other staff  do this for them. Today, you will become obsolete if you don’t at least  personally possess multiple electronic devices (such as laptops, mobile  phones, BlackBerrys, and PDAs) to have the information you need at your  fingertips.