June 18, 2025 • 26 mins
Adam Clark Estes is a senior technology correspondent at Vox and the author of the User Friendly newsletter. Estes sits down with Oz to discuss Amazon’s expanding use of palm scanners and what that might mean for the future of healthcare and our biometric data. They also dive into Estes’ months-long experiment of trying about a dozen health trackers and whether or not it was worth it.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Oz Valoshin. Today is all
about biometric data and how it's increasingly become a part
of modern life. We unlock phones with our faces, send
DNA samples to learn about our ancestry, track our workouts,
and you can even pay for groceries now with the
palm of your hand. But as people get more and
(00:34):
more comfortable using their highly personal data to seamlessly and
efficiently move through life, questions arise, like what's being done
with all this information? And are the benefits to using
biometric technology worth the costs. Here to walk us through
all our questions is Adam clark Estes. He's a senior
technology correspondent at Vox. Adam, welcome to tech stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Hey, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Thank you so much becoming. I love your newsletter and
I was struck by a recent piece you wrote that
began with a visit to the doctor. Can you tell
the story?
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Sure? So, my doctor is at NYU Lango and it's
a huge healthcare system in New York City, and I
walked in one day and there was a little Amazon
branded scanner next to the little kiosk where you check in.
The idea was that I would put my palm over
this sensor and it would scan it, and that's how
it would verify my identity. I didn't do that. There
(01:28):
was an option to opt out of it and go
and visit the desk clerk, which is what the doctor's
office doesn't want you to do because it takes more
time for them and for their staff to verify you,
and the tech based way of doing it is a
lot quicker. But it also just raised a lot of questions,
like I didn't know what I was giving up when
I gave my palm print to Amazon. I didn't know
if that would have anything to do with the ads
(01:49):
I saw on Amazon dot Com. And then I talked
to some privacy experts. I interviewed three or four people
for this story, and ultimately the message was that it's
really hard to say what is going to happen to
your data long term. Amazon has a lot of businesses,
They have a lot of data about you already, and
if they can add more, especially this biometric data, which
(02:11):
to be clear, gives proof that you were at a
place physically, and that's kind of hard to do otherwise
because even just like your phone pinging a cell tower,
doesn't prove that you were somewhere, but if your palm
was at a place that knows that you were at
a doctor's office, you can kind of figure out.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
A digital DNA effectively.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah, right, and then you know, I did talk to
Amazon quite a lot about this. They really tried hard
to make it clear to me that the data being
collected for the Amazon one biometric system was not shared
with other Amazon businesses. It's much less clear in the
privacy policy, and I did talk to lawyers who basically
(02:52):
argued that there's some legalise to work around here that
gives Amazon some wiggle room. But that said, I frankly
kind of believe the company that they're not doing anything
else with this data right now, but it's hard to
say what they'll do with it in the future.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Did you ask them any questions at the doc's office
about like, you know, obviously patients and medical settings are
reasonably quite concerned about their privacy.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
I did. I talked to NYU lengthon and they assured
me that Amazon was not collecting any health data about you.
You know, the sort of interaction you'd have with your
doctor in the doctor's office is covered by hippolaws. Which
are actually quite narrow and specific to your health data.
But everything else, sort of like you're being at the
doctor's office, is not protected by HIPPA in any case.
(03:36):
Nyu langone Health actually had palm scanners before Amazon. They
never worked, but there's just something much more foreboding about
seeing that Amazon logo greet you when you're at the
doctor's office. So I ended up at the end of
this reporting experience back at the doctor's office, and I
still did not put my palm on the scanner.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
I remember when they sort of switched inn apes from
metal detectors to like full body visualization scanners. There was
a time when I resisted and asked for the pat down,
But after about a year of extremely unpleasant experiences, I
was just like, you know what, let me just, you know,
go through the machine that is now technically optional but
(04:19):
practically mandatory. And when you see something as a technology
correspondent like that in a doctor's office, what's your sense
of its kind of inevitability.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Inevitability is a great word, I think, especially with biometrics,
because for the companies that are pushing this technology to us,
there are so many upsides. There are so many upsides
for Amazon to sell this service to businesses. So Amazon
One is the name of the technology, and it's a
new business within Amazon's Aws business. So you know, it's
(04:53):
like a Russian nesting dollar of businesses. And Amazon says
they're all separate, but still you're going to start seeing
these Amazon scanners up. They're already in Whole Foods with
Amazon owns. They're popping up in doctors' offices like at
NYU Lango and health, and you'll see them at stadiums
and it will be annoying enough for people to work
around it that I think a lot of people will
(05:14):
just figure that whatever hang ups they had about their
their privacy, it's easier to just go ahead and comply
and have their palm scanned and frankly, we'll save them
some time. But makes me feel uneasy.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
And what's their widest strategy why they want to take
ownership of this biometric scanning technology.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
There's a bit of a race, I think to come
up with a good way to verify our identities in
a digital world. The New Yorker cartoon of a dog
looking at a computer and the caption is on the internet.
Nobody knows you're a dog I love that one. It's
very easy to mimic somebody else online and increasingly difficult
to prove that you are who you are, even in
(05:58):
the United States. Kind of our gold standard identification method
is our Social Security number, which is not very secure
at all. It's just a string of numbers. So there
are a lot of tech companies who want to get
at this problem. Amazon solution, i think, is this pomp print,
because it is a way of creating a unique identifier
(06:19):
for you. So your palm is basically the key, and
what the scanner does is kind of create a lock
that it can fit into so that the next time
you scan your palm, if the data from that hand
matches that kind of digital lock, it confirms that you
are who you are and you get into wherever you're going.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Why did you find this more concerning or more worthy
of writing about than the thing which we're all accustomed to,
which is opening our iPhones with our faces, Like, what's
the difference between Apple are doing what Amazon are doing
in this respect?
Speaker 2 (06:47):
I'm a fan of face ID and it have been
a fan of touch ID because I know that the
processing that happens is happening on my device that's Apple's
big commitment to privacy is that it's not setting that
data up to the cloud, where as Amazon One is
literally run by Amazon's cloud computing business, so all this
data is kind of has the chance to get out there.
(07:07):
And the trouble with biometric data is that it's pretty permanent.
I can't go out and get a new hand if
the details of my pomprint get out there, I can't.
It's not like changing a password.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
I mean, when you think about the wider Amazon ecosystem,
which is shopping video now verify identity in healthcare setting,
I mean, what's the night meassonaryoo for you here?
Speaker 2 (07:32):
The nightmare scenario for me online at any time is
identity theft. There's so much of my information online if
someone could pretend they were me and really do anything
that I wouldn't want to do, like open a bank
account or buy a new car. And when it comes
to healthcare, it's the most private data I have, and
(07:54):
I think that details about my health now are in
the future that could end up in the wrong hands,
or even in the right hands, could have a bad
outcome for me. I don't necessarily want my health insurance
company to know everything that's happening with me all the time.
I don't necessarily want my employer to know what's happening.
But at the same time, a lot of what has
always kind of pushed me towards privacy online is got
(08:20):
feeling that technology is increasingly encroaching upon our privacy and
kind of changing the definition of what is publicly available information.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Yeah, you also had an experience recently elsewhere in the
Amazon ecosystem that had to do with health and being
recommended prescription drugs.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
The experience I had with prescription drugs and Amazon is
a great example of something that just felt wrong and uncomfortable.
It was a feeling I didn't like having. I ordered
groceries through Amazon Fresh and went to check out, and
at the bottom it was recommending me a list of
prescription drugs. And I had no idea how Amazon would
(09:03):
know what kinds of prescription drugs I might be interested in,
or it might apply to me, or even why I
might be prompted at that specific moment to buy them
from Amazon. I talked to Amazon again about that, and
Amazon told me that the system was working as it should.
It had looked at what I purchased and based on
what other Amazon customers bought from Amazon had recommended something
(09:27):
I thought I would like. In this case, I'll be specific.
I got the reduced fat version of my coffee creamer,
and so it recommended a statin to me to lower
my cholesterol. So I could see kind of on the
back end how that would happen, but it's still just
sort of an uncanny experience.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
This is like if you go to the Woolgreens, you know,
around the corner, and you're in the you're reaching into
the refrigerator to get a low fat yoga and the
pharmacist runs out and tries to use them statins, right,
I mean, it's like that would be pretty weird in
real life.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
It would be, but now that you put it like that,
that's sort of exactly what happened. Amazon has a newer
pharmacy business that it wants people to sign up for,
and if I'm reminded that I might want to take
a statin, then maybe I would sign up and be like, oh, yeah,
it would be more convenient to get my prescriptions through Amazon.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Two.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
So I think it's marketing and a lot of these
recommendations are pushing you towards other Amazon. Businesses to spend
more time and money on Amazon, and that's why Amazon
has a huge, multi billion dollar advertising business.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
What does all of this tell us about Amazon's wider
ambitions in healthcare?
Speaker 2 (10:33):
We've known for some time that Amazon wants to be
a healthcare company, and it's funny ahead of this experiment
years ago, I actually I wrote a whole story about
whether Amazon wants to have an Amazon Prime for healthcare,
and then kind of like what I had been reporting
on in the story ended up happening. Amazon bought a
healthcare company. They bought Amazon One. Amazon launched and then
(10:56):
expanded its pharmacy business, and Amazon is getting into telehealth
as well through the company that have bought One Medical.
It's very clear to me that Amazon wants to be
in the healthcare business. I think because it's a good
business to be in. Just like everybody needs groceries, everybody
needs healthcare, and there's a lot of money to be made.
(11:18):
And I also in this context, I have to think
about how much Amazon knows about us from my own
experience where recommended a statin to me. Amazon knows the
groceries that I'm buying, the books that I'm reading, the
clothes that I'm wearing a lot of times. So all
that data can be leveraged into a business that can
(11:39):
help Amazon grow and make more money. So why wouldn't
they want.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
To be in the healthcare business?
Speaker 1 (11:50):
After the break, how much health trecking is too much?
Health tracking?
Speaker 3 (11:55):
Stay with us.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
So there's this interesting pushball to your point about like
your palm print, creating a new locke when you're quite
happy just to go and checking with a receptionists, like
that's not something you really want. On the other hand,
wearables are a kind of voluntary self conversion into data
in order to optimize, and that's something you've written about
(12:28):
a fair bit as well. And then recently you decided
to write a story about your experience of wearing basically
every wearable that you could feel on your body, including
glucose monitors, watches, rings. Tell us a bit about that
story and what the experience of all of that data was.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
It all started at the beginning of this year at CES,
which is the world's largest electronics show in Las Vegas.
And I've been to CS many times as a technology journalist,
and usually it's a lot of TVs and some goofy robots,
but I'm always looking for innovation, for new things, for
something I hadn't seen before, And what I saw at
CES this year was a continuous glucose monitor for people
(13:10):
who don't have diabetes. These are the little sensors that
you might see on the backs of people's arms. Historically
those have been to help people with diabetes manage their illness,
but now a growing number of companies want to market
them over the counter to people who are interested in
fitness tracking. And what you're tracking is the glucose in
your bloodstream. So I talked to a company there that
(13:31):
was doing it, and then suddenly I started noticing all
these other interesting health tracking products things I hadn't seen before.
There are lots of companies selling smart rings, which have
been around but are kind of newly popular. I saw
and met with a company that actually has headphones that
can track your brain waves.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
It's a company called Neuroble, and they've figured out a
way to take over the year. Headphones the ones that
kind of cup around your ears, and they have electrodes
embedded in them and it can pick up on the
electricity that your brain produces. They have a lot of
ambition for this technology. But right now, the headphones that
they're selling track your attention basically, like there's a you
(14:13):
can kind of imagine a meter showing you how much
you're paying attention. And the more I got distracted by
the meter, the more my attention went down because I
wasn't paying attention to the thing I was supposed to
be paying attention to. So I think that actually kind
of put me over the edge and wanting to do
this story, like what can I track and what's useful
because this is a health tracking is a huge and
(14:33):
growing market and a lot of people are spending a
lot of money to try to make themselves healthier with
the help of tech.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
So you were wearables for many months, and lots of them.
Can you list the wearables that you tried and what
they were kind of marketed to do?
Speaker 2 (14:48):
I'll do my best. There were probably two dozen things
that I tried. The Apple Watch was something I already had.
The woopband was something I hadn't tried before, but I
see a lot of people wearing it and they really
like it. I wore in ordering all the time, but
I really liked it for sleep. Other smart rings I tried,
(15:08):
there's one called the Superhuman ring, one called the Lunar Ring.
I wore headphones that read my brain waves, and I
wore several different cgms. The companies that make the cgms
the sensors themselves are Abbot Pharmaceuticals and dex Calm, and
then the companies that make the software. Abbot has its
(15:31):
own called Lingo, there's a company called Levels and Aura
also recently started doing glucose tracking. So I tried all those,
and then there were other devices that were in the mix,
like Withvings has a number of health tech tools that
I tried. The BPM Vision Plus is a fancy blood
pressure cuff. They have a body scanner that I think
(15:52):
is just called the body scan and I even tried
glasses that also worked as hearing aids. They didn't track
my health per se, but they were kind of they're
in the mix.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Who are these companies marketing to? I mean, who are
these products FORU?
Speaker 2 (16:05):
I think they are basically two groups of people that
these wearable companies are trying to appeal to. One is
the athlete. A lot of these wearable companies started out
as a kind of really hardcore fitness tracking, like the woopband.
I think is particularly tuned towards people who like really
(16:28):
want to optimize their their body's performance. The Superhuman Ring
is another one that is really geared towards athletes, and
the other group of is just everybody else who's just
trying to gain some insight and be a little bit healthier.
Maybe they want to feel better, have more energy, maybe
they want to to sleep better, have more energy. Having
more energy is a pretty common thing people want. But
(16:51):
in general, I don't think that any of these devices
or services really promise anything other than inside and information.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
What did you find useful about the experiment for yourself
and what was less helpful?
Speaker 2 (17:06):
It was at times awful to be in that experiment.
It was self imposed. I knew that I was getting
myself into something that was probably going to end up
being unpleasant, and it was also something that the average
person should never try. I think that when I maxed out,
I would be wearing the headphones, be wearing two or
three smart rings, wristbands on each risk and continuous glucose
(17:27):
monitor as well. At the same time, there are other
things that I couldn't really wear that I was still
trying out, Like I tried a scale that scanned my body.
I tried a service that promised to give me actionable
insights on my gut microbiome, and I did learn a
lot about my health. I think the problem is that
(17:51):
the way all these devices work is pretty similar. They
have sensors that can pick up on things like your
body temperature, but mostly they pick up on your heart
rate and something called heart rate variability. As you may
have guessed, heart rate variability is how much your heart
rate varies at any given time. And I like that.
(18:11):
I just didn't know how much to count on how
the algorithms were kind of analyzing what I was doing.
And the thing is every device was a little bit different.
There were smart rings that told me I was super fit,
and there were smart rings that told me that I
had work to do, so they're all tuned a little
bit differently. But overall, I found that the thing I
wanted most was a way to check in with myself
(18:36):
and know if I was being active enough. And the
other thing and I didn't really expect this to be
such a big factor going into the test was I
really got into the sleep tracking side of it. It's
something I hadn't tried before, but I still wear the
or ring when I sleep, if only to check the
score when I wake up, And I realized it sounds
(18:58):
silly to think that you need to check a score
to see how well you slept. But I have an
eighteen month old. I don't sleep super great. But to
have an extra little bit of data about what I'm
doing when I can't track it at all, I thought
was really helpful. And I am sleeping better, I'm going
to bed earlier. I find myself listening to the software
telling me what to do and feeling better as a result.
(19:21):
And I think that if the goal for this was anything,
it was to feel a little bit better and more
confident about my health. And although it was a bumpy
road the last six months, I think I got to
a good place.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Two kind of bigger zoom out questions. One is we're
living in this sort of Maha time. Make America healthy again.
And I think the one app which is truly like
capture people's imagination this year is Yuka Right. You can
scan products in the supermarket, in the grocery store and
it will tell you the ingredients and how healthy the ingredients.
(19:53):
So I was a French app and people are going
crazy for it, and I think huge corporations like Into
the Amazon changing the formulas and their products in response
to consumer demand based around this app. It's sort of
this idea that the best way to be in control
of your health is to have more knowledge and to
(20:13):
basically be your own doctor in some respects. Right, So
is there a wide a cultural, socio political trend into
which all of this is fitting.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
There's absolutely a bigger picture here. And I didn't even
know that I was going to be getting into to
the Mahab movement in this experiment until one of the
companies that I tested out that sells continuous glucose monitors.
They make the software actually was co founded by Trump's
pick for Surge. In general, Casey means, the company is
called Levels, and it is very much about giving you
(20:47):
more information about what you're eating and how your body
is responding to it. And it's hard to argue with
giving people more information, but I do think that it's
a slippery slope when you are are not just empowering
them with information, but empowering people to take things into
their own hands. And I did feel like some of
(21:08):
these health tracking companies flirt with that idea of you,
you can be your own doctor, and you can make
the right healthcare decisions without needing to be involved in
the healthcare system. There are a lot of criticisms about
the US healthcare system that are really valid. But I
think that there are some of the Maha movement that
(21:28):
kind of think that people can make decisions better themselves
with the right devices and technologies, and having spent a
lot of time with these devices and technologies, I don't
think that's the case for me. I still like talking
to my doctor, and I still believe in traditional healthcare,
but I do think that this tech can be a
(21:49):
good supplement for a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
I remember in my high school theology class, so we
were introduced to this concept of the God of the gaps,
which is basically like everything you couldn't explain with science,
you could say, oh God, that's God, and that was
like a kind of diminishing wedge of like God's role
in the world. It makes me think about the tech
of the gaps. In other words, like we're in a
time where's mental health crisis, and so people are using
(22:13):
large language models to be a therapist. There's a time
where it's like tremendous chronic illness and very very uneven
access to healthcare, and so we see these like fitness
trapping tracking apps emerge like there's a kind of like
patchwork tech solutionism, which at the margins that all these
things can obviously be good, but in the aggregate they
(22:33):
do point towards like a wider absence.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Perhaps that's absolutely true, and it's something that I addressed
in my piece about this. There is a primary healthcare
crisis in the US, and it's not just an access
to healthcare crisis, which is its own crisis. Not enough
people in the US have health insurance, not enough can
get access to a doctor, and even if they do,
their primary care doctor is probably overworked and can't spend
(22:59):
more than ten minutes with them maybe in the whole year.
I can see how it's hard to depend on that
system for most people. And technology isn't necessarily coming in
to replace your doctor. I think that it's coming to
help make you feel better about what you're doing, maybe
in the absence of a doctor. But I continue to
(23:19):
kind of have a hard time towing the line here
because I do think that these devices are really helpful,
and I think that the technology is good but from
my own personal experience, I found that the more information
I collected about myself and my body, the more anxious
I felt about not knowing what it meant or what
to do with it. And then that's where I think
(23:40):
that the healthcare system has to come into play.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Just to close we told to the beginning the conversation
about privacy biometric data palm scans at the doctor, how
concerned were you and should other consumers be about this
treasure trove of health data escaping. I mean, obviously you
feel like it's your rings, you'll whoop, it's your Apple watch,
it's your continuous glucose monitor. But we've seen time and
(24:06):
again that the databases that stills information are permeable. How
much of a concern is that for you? And how
robust are the so security protocols from any of these
consumert health treking companies.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
One thing I think that is really important to point
out here is that the data being collected by your
or ring, or your wo band or Apple watch is
not covered by HIPPA. Again, HIPPA is a really narrow
law and it's very serious, and I think the data
is well protected, but it's like your messages between you
and your doctor and your test results. Those things are covered,
but your oring data is not. We have seen major breaches.
(24:42):
There is a huge fit bit breach where a lot
of people's data got out there. I think with biometric
data it's permanent, so once it is out there, if
Amazon One got hacked and everybody's pomprints got out there,
they'd be out there. We saw what happens when data
kind of ends up in unexpected hands with the twenty
three and me bankruptcy, where a lot of people's DNA
(25:03):
information was up for sale. So I think that most
people should assume that whatever data they're giving up when
wearing one of these devices could get hacked and could
end up on the dark web being sold. But that's
true with any data that you're giving up when you're
surfing the web or doing anything with technology. I think
that there are companies that I trust more with my
(25:25):
data who have made a stronger commitment to protecting it,
like Apple. But I also think that there's a faith
that you have to have in using some of these products,
otherwise you'll go crazier or just not be able to
use technology in general. If you're just too scared about
getting hacked or a breach.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Adam, thank you so much, Thank you for tech Stuff.
I'mos Vloschin. This episode was produced by Elyza Dennis, Victoria Dominguez,
(26:14):
and Adriana Toppia. It was executive produced by me, Karen
Price and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norval for
iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch
wrote our theme song. Join us on Friday for the
Weekend tech when we'll run through all the headlines you
may have missed, and please rate, review, and reach out
(26:35):
to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.
Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Oz Valoshin. Today is all
about biometric data and how it's increasingly become a part
of modern life. We unlock phones with our faces, send
DNA samples to learn about our ancestry, track our workouts,
and you can even pay for groceries now with the
palm of your hand. But as people get more and
(00:34):
more comfortable using their highly personal data to seamlessly and
efficiently move through life, questions arise, like what's being done
with all this information? And are the benefits to using
biometric technology worth the costs. Here to walk us through
all our questions is Adam clark Estes. He's a senior
technology correspondent at Vox. Adam, welcome to tech stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Hey, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Thank you so much becoming. I love your newsletter and
I was struck by a recent piece you wrote that
began with a visit to the doctor. Can you tell
the story?
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Sure? So, my doctor is at NYU Lango and it's
a huge healthcare system in New York City, and I
walked in one day and there was a little Amazon
branded scanner next to the little kiosk where you check in.
The idea was that I would put my palm over
this sensor and it would scan it, and that's how
it would verify my identity. I didn't do that. There
(01:28):
was an option to opt out of it and go
and visit the desk clerk, which is what the doctor's
office doesn't want you to do because it takes more
time for them and for their staff to verify you,
and the tech based way of doing it is a
lot quicker. But it also just raised a lot of questions,
like I didn't know what I was giving up when
I gave my palm print to Amazon. I didn't know
if that would have anything to do with the ads
(01:49):
I saw on Amazon dot Com. And then I talked
to some privacy experts. I interviewed three or four people
for this story, and ultimately the message was that it's
really hard to say what is going to happen to
your data long term. Amazon has a lot of businesses,
They have a lot of data about you already, and
if they can add more, especially this biometric data, which
(02:11):
to be clear, gives proof that you were at a
place physically, and that's kind of hard to do otherwise
because even just like your phone pinging a cell tower,
doesn't prove that you were somewhere, but if your palm
was at a place that knows that you were at
a doctor's office, you can kind of figure out.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
A digital DNA effectively.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah, right, and then you know, I did talk to
Amazon quite a lot about this. They really tried hard
to make it clear to me that the data being
collected for the Amazon one biometric system was not shared
with other Amazon businesses. It's much less clear in the
privacy policy, and I did talk to lawyers who basically
(02:52):
argued that there's some legalise to work around here that
gives Amazon some wiggle room. But that said, I frankly
kind of believe the company that they're not doing anything
else with this data right now, but it's hard to
say what they'll do with it in the future.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Did you ask them any questions at the doc's office
about like, you know, obviously patients and medical settings are
reasonably quite concerned about their privacy.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
I did. I talked to NYU lengthon and they assured
me that Amazon was not collecting any health data about you.
You know, the sort of interaction you'd have with your
doctor in the doctor's office is covered by hippolaws. Which
are actually quite narrow and specific to your health data.
But everything else, sort of like you're being at the
doctor's office, is not protected by HIPPA in any case.
(03:36):
Nyu langone Health actually had palm scanners before Amazon. They
never worked, but there's just something much more foreboding about
seeing that Amazon logo greet you when you're at the
doctor's office. So I ended up at the end of
this reporting experience back at the doctor's office, and I
still did not put my palm on the scanner.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
I remember when they sort of switched inn apes from
metal detectors to like full body visualization scanners. There was
a time when I resisted and asked for the pat down,
But after about a year of extremely unpleasant experiences, I
was just like, you know what, let me just, you know,
go through the machine that is now technically optional but
(04:19):
practically mandatory. And when you see something as a technology
correspondent like that in a doctor's office, what's your sense
of its kind of inevitability.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Inevitability is a great word, I think, especially with biometrics,
because for the companies that are pushing this technology to us,
there are so many upsides. There are so many upsides
for Amazon to sell this service to businesses. So Amazon
One is the name of the technology, and it's a
new business within Amazon's Aws business. So you know, it's
(04:53):
like a Russian nesting dollar of businesses. And Amazon says
they're all separate, but still you're going to start seeing
these Amazon scanners up. They're already in Whole Foods with
Amazon owns. They're popping up in doctors' offices like at
NYU Lango and health, and you'll see them at stadiums
and it will be annoying enough for people to work
around it that I think a lot of people will
(05:14):
just figure that whatever hang ups they had about their
their privacy, it's easier to just go ahead and comply
and have their palm scanned and frankly, we'll save them
some time. But makes me feel uneasy.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
And what's their widest strategy why they want to take
ownership of this biometric scanning technology.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
There's a bit of a race, I think to come
up with a good way to verify our identities in
a digital world. The New Yorker cartoon of a dog
looking at a computer and the caption is on the internet.
Nobody knows you're a dog I love that one. It's
very easy to mimic somebody else online and increasingly difficult
to prove that you are who you are, even in
(05:58):
the United States. Kind of our gold standard identification method
is our Social Security number, which is not very secure
at all. It's just a string of numbers. So there
are a lot of tech companies who want to get
at this problem. Amazon solution, i think, is this pomp print,
because it is a way of creating a unique identifier
(06:19):
for you. So your palm is basically the key, and
what the scanner does is kind of create a lock
that it can fit into so that the next time
you scan your palm, if the data from that hand
matches that kind of digital lock, it confirms that you
are who you are and you get into wherever you're going.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Why did you find this more concerning or more worthy
of writing about than the thing which we're all accustomed to,
which is opening our iPhones with our faces, Like, what's
the difference between Apple are doing what Amazon are doing
in this respect?
Speaker 2 (06:47):
I'm a fan of face ID and it have been
a fan of touch ID because I know that the
processing that happens is happening on my device that's Apple's
big commitment to privacy is that it's not setting that
data up to the cloud, where as Amazon One is
literally run by Amazon's cloud computing business, so all this
data is kind of has the chance to get out there.
(07:07):
And the trouble with biometric data is that it's pretty permanent.
I can't go out and get a new hand if
the details of my pomprint get out there, I can't.
It's not like changing a password.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
I mean, when you think about the wider Amazon ecosystem,
which is shopping video now verify identity in healthcare setting,
I mean, what's the night meassonaryoo for you here?
Speaker 2 (07:32):
The nightmare scenario for me online at any time is
identity theft. There's so much of my information online if
someone could pretend they were me and really do anything
that I wouldn't want to do, like open a bank
account or buy a new car. And when it comes
to healthcare, it's the most private data I have, and
(07:54):
I think that details about my health now are in
the future that could end up in the wrong hands,
or even in the right hands, could have a bad
outcome for me. I don't necessarily want my health insurance
company to know everything that's happening with me all the time.
I don't necessarily want my employer to know what's happening.
But at the same time, a lot of what has
always kind of pushed me towards privacy online is got
(08:20):
feeling that technology is increasingly encroaching upon our privacy and
kind of changing the definition of what is publicly available information.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Yeah, you also had an experience recently elsewhere in the
Amazon ecosystem that had to do with health and being
recommended prescription drugs.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
The experience I had with prescription drugs and Amazon is
a great example of something that just felt wrong and uncomfortable.
It was a feeling I didn't like having. I ordered
groceries through Amazon Fresh and went to check out, and
at the bottom it was recommending me a list of
prescription drugs. And I had no idea how Amazon would
(09:03):
know what kinds of prescription drugs I might be interested in,
or it might apply to me, or even why I
might be prompted at that specific moment to buy them
from Amazon. I talked to Amazon again about that, and
Amazon told me that the system was working as it should.
It had looked at what I purchased and based on
what other Amazon customers bought from Amazon had recommended something
(09:27):
I thought I would like. In this case, I'll be specific.
I got the reduced fat version of my coffee creamer,
and so it recommended a statin to me to lower
my cholesterol. So I could see kind of on the
back end how that would happen, but it's still just
sort of an uncanny experience.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
This is like if you go to the Woolgreens, you know,
around the corner, and you're in the you're reaching into
the refrigerator to get a low fat yoga and the
pharmacist runs out and tries to use them statins, right,
I mean, it's like that would be pretty weird in
real life.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
It would be, but now that you put it like that,
that's sort of exactly what happened. Amazon has a newer
pharmacy business that it wants people to sign up for,
and if I'm reminded that I might want to take
a statin, then maybe I would sign up and be like, oh, yeah,
it would be more convenient to get my prescriptions through Amazon.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Two.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
So I think it's marketing and a lot of these
recommendations are pushing you towards other Amazon. Businesses to spend
more time and money on Amazon, and that's why Amazon
has a huge, multi billion dollar advertising business.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
What does all of this tell us about Amazon's wider
ambitions in healthcare?
Speaker 2 (10:33):
We've known for some time that Amazon wants to be
a healthcare company, and it's funny ahead of this experiment
years ago, I actually I wrote a whole story about
whether Amazon wants to have an Amazon Prime for healthcare,
and then kind of like what I had been reporting
on in the story ended up happening. Amazon bought a
healthcare company. They bought Amazon One. Amazon launched and then
(10:56):
expanded its pharmacy business, and Amazon is getting into telehealth
as well through the company that have bought One Medical.
It's very clear to me that Amazon wants to be
in the healthcare business. I think because it's a good
business to be in. Just like everybody needs groceries, everybody
needs healthcare, and there's a lot of money to be made.
(11:18):
And I also in this context, I have to think
about how much Amazon knows about us from my own
experience where recommended a statin to me. Amazon knows the
groceries that I'm buying, the books that I'm reading, the
clothes that I'm wearing a lot of times. So all
that data can be leveraged into a business that can
(11:39):
help Amazon grow and make more money. So why wouldn't
they want.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
To be in the healthcare business?
Speaker 1 (11:50):
After the break, how much health trecking is too much?
Health tracking?
Speaker 3 (11:55):
Stay with us.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
So there's this interesting pushball to your point about like
your palm print, creating a new locke when you're quite
happy just to go and checking with a receptionists, like
that's not something you really want. On the other hand,
wearables are a kind of voluntary self conversion into data
in order to optimize, and that's something you've written about
(12:28):
a fair bit as well. And then recently you decided
to write a story about your experience of wearing basically
every wearable that you could feel on your body, including
glucose monitors, watches, rings. Tell us a bit about that
story and what the experience of all of that data was.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
It all started at the beginning of this year at CES,
which is the world's largest electronics show in Las Vegas.
And I've been to CS many times as a technology journalist,
and usually it's a lot of TVs and some goofy robots,
but I'm always looking for innovation, for new things, for
something I hadn't seen before, And what I saw at
CES this year was a continuous glucose monitor for people
(13:10):
who don't have diabetes. These are the little sensors that
you might see on the backs of people's arms. Historically
those have been to help people with diabetes manage their illness,
but now a growing number of companies want to market
them over the counter to people who are interested in
fitness tracking. And what you're tracking is the glucose in
your bloodstream. So I talked to a company there that
(13:31):
was doing it, and then suddenly I started noticing all
these other interesting health tracking products things I hadn't seen before.
There are lots of companies selling smart rings, which have
been around but are kind of newly popular. I saw
and met with a company that actually has headphones that
can track your brain waves.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
It's a company called Neuroble, and they've figured out a
way to take over the year. Headphones the ones that
kind of cup around your ears, and they have electrodes
embedded in them and it can pick up on the
electricity that your brain produces. They have a lot of
ambition for this technology. But right now, the headphones that
they're selling track your attention basically, like there's a you
(14:13):
can kind of imagine a meter showing you how much
you're paying attention. And the more I got distracted by
the meter, the more my attention went down because I
wasn't paying attention to the thing I was supposed to
be paying attention to. So I think that actually kind
of put me over the edge and wanting to do
this story, like what can I track and what's useful
because this is a health tracking is a huge and
(14:33):
growing market and a lot of people are spending a
lot of money to try to make themselves healthier with
the help of tech.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
So you were wearables for many months, and lots of them.
Can you list the wearables that you tried and what
they were kind of marketed to do?
Speaker 2 (14:48):
I'll do my best. There were probably two dozen things
that I tried. The Apple Watch was something I already had.
The woopband was something I hadn't tried before, but I
see a lot of people wearing it and they really
like it. I wore in ordering all the time, but
I really liked it for sleep. Other smart rings I tried,
(15:08):
there's one called the Superhuman ring, one called the Lunar Ring.
I wore headphones that read my brain waves, and I
wore several different cgms. The companies that make the cgms
the sensors themselves are Abbot Pharmaceuticals and dex Calm, and
then the companies that make the software. Abbot has its
(15:31):
own called Lingo, there's a company called Levels and Aura
also recently started doing glucose tracking. So I tried all those,
and then there were other devices that were in the mix,
like Withvings has a number of health tech tools that
I tried. The BPM Vision Plus is a fancy blood
pressure cuff. They have a body scanner that I think
(15:52):
is just called the body scan and I even tried
glasses that also worked as hearing aids. They didn't track
my health per se, but they were kind of they're
in the mix.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Who are these companies marketing to? I mean, who are
these products FORU?
Speaker 2 (16:05):
I think they are basically two groups of people that
these wearable companies are trying to appeal to. One is
the athlete. A lot of these wearable companies started out
as a kind of really hardcore fitness tracking, like the woopband.
I think is particularly tuned towards people who like really
(16:28):
want to optimize their their body's performance. The Superhuman Ring
is another one that is really geared towards athletes, and
the other group of is just everybody else who's just
trying to gain some insight and be a little bit healthier.
Maybe they want to feel better, have more energy, maybe
they want to to sleep better, have more energy. Having
more energy is a pretty common thing people want. But
(16:51):
in general, I don't think that any of these devices
or services really promise anything other than inside and information.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
What did you find useful about the experiment for yourself
and what was less helpful?
Speaker 2 (17:06):
It was at times awful to be in that experiment.
It was self imposed. I knew that I was getting
myself into something that was probably going to end up
being unpleasant, and it was also something that the average
person should never try. I think that when I maxed out,
I would be wearing the headphones, be wearing two or
three smart rings, wristbands on each risk and continuous glucose
(17:27):
monitor as well. At the same time, there are other
things that I couldn't really wear that I was still
trying out, Like I tried a scale that scanned my body.
I tried a service that promised to give me actionable
insights on my gut microbiome, and I did learn a
lot about my health. I think the problem is that
(17:51):
the way all these devices work is pretty similar. They
have sensors that can pick up on things like your
body temperature, but mostly they pick up on your heart
rate and something called heart rate variability. As you may
have guessed, heart rate variability is how much your heart
rate varies at any given time. And I like that.
(18:11):
I just didn't know how much to count on how
the algorithms were kind of analyzing what I was doing.
And the thing is every device was a little bit different.
There were smart rings that told me I was super fit,
and there were smart rings that told me that I
had work to do, so they're all tuned a little
bit differently. But overall, I found that the thing I
wanted most was a way to check in with myself
(18:36):
and know if I was being active enough. And the
other thing and I didn't really expect this to be
such a big factor going into the test was I
really got into the sleep tracking side of it. It's
something I hadn't tried before, but I still wear the
or ring when I sleep, if only to check the
score when I wake up, And I realized it sounds
(18:58):
silly to think that you need to check a score
to see how well you slept. But I have an
eighteen month old. I don't sleep super great. But to
have an extra little bit of data about what I'm
doing when I can't track it at all, I thought
was really helpful. And I am sleeping better, I'm going
to bed earlier. I find myself listening to the software
telling me what to do and feeling better as a result.
(19:21):
And I think that if the goal for this was anything,
it was to feel a little bit better and more
confident about my health. And although it was a bumpy
road the last six months, I think I got to
a good place.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Two kind of bigger zoom out questions. One is we're
living in this sort of Maha time. Make America healthy again.
And I think the one app which is truly like
capture people's imagination this year is Yuka Right. You can
scan products in the supermarket, in the grocery store and
it will tell you the ingredients and how healthy the ingredients.
(19:53):
So I was a French app and people are going
crazy for it, and I think huge corporations like Into
the Amazon changing the formulas and their products in response
to consumer demand based around this app. It's sort of
this idea that the best way to be in control
of your health is to have more knowledge and to
(20:13):
basically be your own doctor in some respects. Right, So
is there a wide a cultural, socio political trend into
which all of this is fitting.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
There's absolutely a bigger picture here. And I didn't even
know that I was going to be getting into to
the Mahab movement in this experiment until one of the
companies that I tested out that sells continuous glucose monitors.
They make the software actually was co founded by Trump's
pick for Surge. In general, Casey means, the company is
called Levels, and it is very much about giving you
(20:47):
more information about what you're eating and how your body
is responding to it. And it's hard to argue with
giving people more information, but I do think that it's
a slippery slope when you are are not just empowering
them with information, but empowering people to take things into
their own hands. And I did feel like some of
(21:08):
these health tracking companies flirt with that idea of you,
you can be your own doctor, and you can make
the right healthcare decisions without needing to be involved in
the healthcare system. There are a lot of criticisms about
the US healthcare system that are really valid. But I
think that there are some of the Maha movement that
(21:28):
kind of think that people can make decisions better themselves
with the right devices and technologies, and having spent a
lot of time with these devices and technologies, I don't
think that's the case for me. I still like talking
to my doctor, and I still believe in traditional healthcare,
but I do think that this tech can be a
(21:49):
good supplement for a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
I remember in my high school theology class, so we
were introduced to this concept of the God of the gaps,
which is basically like everything you couldn't explain with science,
you could say, oh God, that's God, and that was
like a kind of diminishing wedge of like God's role
in the world. It makes me think about the tech
of the gaps. In other words, like we're in a
time where's mental health crisis, and so people are using
(22:13):
large language models to be a therapist. There's a time
where it's like tremendous chronic illness and very very uneven
access to healthcare, and so we see these like fitness
trapping tracking apps emerge like there's a kind of like
patchwork tech solutionism, which at the margins that all these
things can obviously be good, but in the aggregate they
(22:33):
do point towards like a wider absence.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Perhaps that's absolutely true, and it's something that I addressed
in my piece about this. There is a primary healthcare
crisis in the US, and it's not just an access
to healthcare crisis, which is its own crisis. Not enough
people in the US have health insurance, not enough can
get access to a doctor, and even if they do,
their primary care doctor is probably overworked and can't spend
(22:59):
more than ten minutes with them maybe in the whole year.
I can see how it's hard to depend on that
system for most people. And technology isn't necessarily coming in
to replace your doctor. I think that it's coming to
help make you feel better about what you're doing, maybe
in the absence of a doctor. But I continue to
(23:19):
kind of have a hard time towing the line here
because I do think that these devices are really helpful,
and I think that the technology is good but from
my own personal experience, I found that the more information
I collected about myself and my body, the more anxious
I felt about not knowing what it meant or what
to do with it. And then that's where I think
(23:40):
that the healthcare system has to come into play.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Just to close we told to the beginning the conversation
about privacy biometric data palm scans at the doctor, how
concerned were you and should other consumers be about this
treasure trove of health data escaping. I mean, obviously you
feel like it's your rings, you'll whoop, it's your Apple watch,
it's your continuous glucose monitor. But we've seen time and
(24:06):
again that the databases that stills information are permeable. How
much of a concern is that for you? And how
robust are the so security protocols from any of these
consumert health treking companies.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
One thing I think that is really important to point
out here is that the data being collected by your
or ring, or your wo band or Apple watch is
not covered by HIPPA. Again, HIPPA is a really narrow
law and it's very serious, and I think the data
is well protected, but it's like your messages between you
and your doctor and your test results. Those things are covered,
but your oring data is not. We have seen major breaches.
(24:42):
There is a huge fit bit breach where a lot
of people's data got out there. I think with biometric
data it's permanent, so once it is out there, if
Amazon One got hacked and everybody's pomprints got out there,
they'd be out there. We saw what happens when data
kind of ends up in unexpected hands with the twenty
three and me bankruptcy, where a lot of people's DNA
(25:03):
information was up for sale. So I think that most
people should assume that whatever data they're giving up when
wearing one of these devices could get hacked and could
end up on the dark web being sold. But that's
true with any data that you're giving up when you're
surfing the web or doing anything with technology. I think
that there are companies that I trust more with my
(25:25):
data who have made a stronger commitment to protecting it,
like Apple. But I also think that there's a faith
that you have to have in using some of these products,
otherwise you'll go crazier or just not be able to
use technology in general. If you're just too scared about
getting hacked or a breach.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Adam, thank you so much, Thank you for tech Stuff.
I'mos Vloschin. This episode was produced by Elyza Dennis, Victoria Dominguez,
(26:14):
and Adriana Toppia. It was executive produced by me, Karen
Price and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norval for
iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch
wrote our theme song. Join us on Friday for the
Weekend tech when we'll run through all the headlines you
may have missed, and please rate, review, and reach out
(26:35):
to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.
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