This article reminded me of my experience with PushHealth, the site where I got a prescription for metformin (and rapa) a couple of years ago. Some months after I got the metformin subscription, I got a new life insurance policy - during the process the underwriter asked about the metformin and why I had a prescription. I was surprised that they were able to get that info from Push. I was able to get coverage, but beware for folks getting a bunch of diabetes medicines via prescription from online pharmacies like Push, Amazon, et al in the US!
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Wow - thats ridiculous. I would have thought that HIPAA and related privacy laws protected that information. Definitely something people would want to ask the Telehealth provider before using them (do they share the prescription data with any other companies?).
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As if to accentuate the importance of the privacy issue…Amazon Pharmacy sent me a push email about 30 minutes after accessing the Stat article online…WITH METFORMIN IN THE AD! (I had not used them to fill that prescription either)
Well, that may just be a generic ad that they use, Metformin is the most prescribed drug in the USA I think, so it would make sense to use it in any ad for the mass market.
I’m suspicious. PushHealth uses AWS…
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Good article on privacy by Vitalik, April 14th, 2025.
At this time, it’s worth stepping back and reviewing the question: why do we want privacy in the first place? Each person’s answer will be different. In this post I will give my own, which I will break down into three parts:
- Privacy is freedom: privacy gives us space to live our lives in the ways that meet our needs, without constantly worrying about how our actions will be perceived in all kinds of political and social games
- Privacy is order: a whole bunch of mechanisms that underlie the basic functioning of society depend on privacy in order to function
- Privacy is progress: if we gain new ways to share our information selectively while protecting it from being misused, we can unlock a lot of value and accelerate technological and social progress
It’s disappointing in my view that every single technology has to be connected via an app, phone home, have a subscription that’s akin to rent seeking. Open up the hardware, display it directly on the device or an attachment. Let us connect devices that track e.g sleep to open source software.
Will people want brain implants connected to their phone, running closed software, phoning home?