By Craig Rucker – CFact
The digital world tends toward monopoly.
Sure, there are other search engines, social media, video, encyclopedia, commerce, auction sites, etc. but those niches are DOMINATED by Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon and Ebay.
That gives big data companies great power and great responsibility to conduct themselves ethically and fairly.
Their potential to abuse privacy and stifle speech are right out of Orwell. Worse in fact. Orwell’s “thought police” could only have dreamed of upgrading their direct personal surveillance to today’s omnipresent total data monitoring.
CFACT takes this seriously. We are ramping up our coverage and taking 
action.
David Wojick kicks off our current spotlight on this crucial issue with an article at CFACT.org about YouTube’s new practice of posting excerpts from Wikipedia next to articles about the climate.
This is problematic for a number of reasons. Wikipedia is no neutral referee. It is notoriously biased, particularly about climate change. Posting the near universally accepted fact that there was some warming last century next to videos that point out, for instance, that climate computer models project warmer temperatures than observations show, obscures the genuine points of discussion.
The Left fears level playing fields. They don’t fear false information. They fear genuine facts that deflate their narratives.
The big data players need to be neutral platforms respecting all points of view.
Free speech and free expression are at risk and need protection.
Ref.: http://www.cfact.org/2018/08/14/big-tech-bias/
Alphabet, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft Want Hospitals’ Data
Sean Gallup/Getty Images
By Charlie Nash – Breitbart
Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com have launched a campaign for restrictions on data sharing between hospitals to be dropped.
At the Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference in Washington, D.C., the companies issued a joint statement against patient data sharing restrictions.
“We are jointly committed to removing barriers for the adoption of technologies for healthcare interoperability, particularly those that are enabled through the cloud and AI,” the companies declared. “We share the common quest to unlock the potential in healthcare data, to deliver better outcomes at lower costs.”
According to CNBC, the companies even proposed building tools “for the health community around a set of common standards for exchanging health information electronically.”
Aneesh Chopra, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama as the first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the United States of America, praised the campaign in an interview with CNBC.
“Today’s announcement is both a big deal, and just a start,” Chopra proclaimed. “The big deal is that the major cloud platforms, like Apple earlier this year, understand that a sector as complicated as healthcare benefits greatly from open standards… However, it is a start, as we have so much more work to do to standardize the entire health record, with the capacity for applications to read and write back to the patient’s record without special effort.”
The Obama administration’s involvement in healthcare I.T., Healthcare.gov, is considered one of the great technological failures of our time.
Amazon has recently announced it will open healthcare clinics for employees in Seattle, with an eye on expanding. The company is also partnering with Berkshire Hathaway to focus on free-market healthcare reform.
