This is a story of someone I'm close to had to go to the doctor for post covid treatment. The issue wasn't life threatening or wasn't even very private.
So as usual we had to go through the cycle of doctor > blood tests > prescription > getting meds. Nothing fancy. While going through this cycle
1. Most specialists and hospitals in India use Practo app to handle all the appointments, billing, prescription etc. And it's backed by Tencent
2. Ordered blood tests from thyrocare through 1mg. Thyrocare instead of directly delivering your reports, they send them to 1mg first and 1mg shares them to you via their Whatsapp business app. 1mg is owned by Tata and whatsapp business chat are read by facebook as per new privacy rules.
3. As usual doctor only prescribes you commission wala expensive medication which is only available at medical store next to his clinic. Off course we aren't crazy to buy from such medicals. So I (being the tech savvy) ordered cheaper variants of the meds which are made by better farma companies like Cipla from netmeds.com. Meds are packed and shipped by Reliance Retail which is also the owner of the netmeds.
4. Appointments, invoices, reports etc everything is being communicated through email which in this case is gmail. You searched about specialist on Google maps. You type through Gboard or chrome's enhanced spell check who run whatever you are typing by google's servers. Everything here is owned by Google.
In the end, we share health data with Tencent, Facebook, Tata, Reliance, Google.
Obviously we know China controls Tencent and Google, Facebook expose data to US govt (search Patriot law). Between these two countries, I don't know which is a lesser evil. 7-8 years ago I was pretty relieved when Edward Snowden said the data NSA is gathering is so immense that it's not humanly possible to interpret. Little did I know that today you could easily use a bot to machine learn for interpreting this data from your computer.
So as usual we had to go through the cycle of doctor > blood tests > prescription > getting meds. Nothing fancy. While going through this cycle
1. Most specialists and hospitals in India use Practo app to handle all the appointments, billing, prescription etc. And it's backed by Tencent
2. Ordered blood tests from thyrocare through 1mg. Thyrocare instead of directly delivering your reports, they send them to 1mg first and 1mg shares them to you via their Whatsapp business app. 1mg is owned by Tata and whatsapp business chat are read by facebook as per new privacy rules.
3. As usual doctor only prescribes you commission wala expensive medication which is only available at medical store next to his clinic. Off course we aren't crazy to buy from such medicals. So I (being the tech savvy) ordered cheaper variants of the meds which are made by better farma companies like Cipla from netmeds.com. Meds are packed and shipped by Reliance Retail which is also the owner of the netmeds.
4. Appointments, invoices, reports etc everything is being communicated through email which in this case is gmail. You searched about specialist on Google maps. You type through Gboard or chrome's enhanced spell check who run whatever you are typing by google's servers. Everything here is owned by Google.
In the end, we share health data with Tencent, Facebook, Tata, Reliance, Google.
Obviously we know China controls Tencent and Google, Facebook expose data to US govt (search Patriot law). Between these two countries, I don't know which is a lesser evil. 7-8 years ago I was pretty relieved when Edward Snowden said the data NSA is gathering is so immense that it's not humanly possible to interpret. Little did I know that today you could easily use a bot to machine learn for interpreting this data from your computer.