#i went down an information rabbit hole with the ink brand

[reine-du-sourire]

Amaranthine

Cheslock's in the library when Edward finds him, standing on tiptoes to reach a gilt-edged blue tome with golden letters dancing along its spine. With a soft grunt, Cheslock manages to tip it down and turns, triumphant, tucking the book under his arm. "Hiya, Ed." "Hello, Cheslock." Edward can't help a smile. "Are you busy?" Cheslock looks curiously at the elegant rectangular parcel that Edward is holding. "I can spare a minute. What have ya got there?"

Edward opens the box. "Some new inks. I only ordered black, but I received this set as well- it might have been an accident, or maybe they're just complimentary samples. I thought you might like to have them. I don't use colored inks."

"So send 'em back," Cheslock shrugs. His eyes scan the row of little jars nestled in black velvet lining, and he selects a bottle of deep reddish-violet ink, turning it over in his fingers. "It's nice stuff. Or save 'em."

"Or I could give them to you. It's hardly worth the bother to return them."

"Why would ya give 'em to me?"

"I thought you'd like them."

Cheslock picks up a midnight blue ink and rolls it back and forth between his hands, allowing it to clink gently against the purple-red one. "Where'd ya say you got 'em from?"

"Antoine & Fils," Edward replies. "My father's favorite manufacturer."

"Oh. Pricey." Cheslock passes the ink back. "Nah."

"As a gift, Cheslock! You don't have to pay me for them!"

"Not into gifts."

"As a favor to me, then? So I don't have to return them?"

"Not into favors either. I don't like owing people."

"It's not owing-! And- and it's not like you don't do favors, you've done favors for me, you gave me a massage last week-"

"That's 'cause ya squeak like a sick mouse, and it's funny."

Edward flushes. "I do not!"

"Yeah, ya do," Cheslock says lazily. He picks up the purple-red ink again. "Think the teachers'll have a fit if I hand in essays in this?"

"Cheslock, you shouldn't do that." Edward shakes his head. "You can use it to write your music. Or your letters home."

"Or I can make tattoos."

"You definitely shouldn't do that."

"You're the one who wanted me to take 'em."

"Yes, but not for tattoos!"

With a grin, Cheslock replaces the ink and takes the box from Edward, tucking it under his arm with the book and leaning forward to whisper directly into Edward's ear. "Maybe I'll give you a tattoo."

"Cheslock!"

"There's that sick mouse again. Is that why ya bought me fancy inks, 'cause I gave ya a massage? See? You can't stand owing anyone either, I bet."

"I said it's not owing! And I didn't buy them, they were complimentary!"

"You're such a gentleman, Midford." Cheslock's hand comes up to tug gently at Edward's earlobe. "Your ears go all pink when ya lie."

The rest of Edward's face goes vibrantly red as well. "Cheslock!"

"Thanks for the inks, Eddie. I've gotta go now. See ya 'round, okay?"

"Of course," Edward mumbles, and wonders whether his munificence will be the death of him.

The spring in Cheslock's step as he leaves the library suggests that it might not be, though, and Edward smiles.

Link to AO3

[endenogatai]

Alexa, where are the legal limits on what Amazon can do with my health data?

The contract between the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and ecommerce giant Amazon — for a health information licensing partnership involving its Alexa voice AI — has been released following a Freedom of Information request.

The government announced the partnership this summer. But the date on the contract, which was published on the gov.uk contracts finder site months after the FOI was filed, shows the open-ended arrangement to funnel nipped-and-tucked health advice from the NHS’ website to Alexa users in audio form was inked back in December 2018.

The contract is between the UK government and Amazon US (Amazon Digital Services, Delaware) — rather than Amazon UK. 

Nor is it a standard NHS Choices content syndication contract. A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) confirmed the legal agreement uses an Amazon contract template. She told us the department had worked jointly with Amazon to adapt the template to fit the intended use — i.e. access to publicly funded healthcare information from the NHS’ website.

The NHS does make the same information freely available on its website, of course. As well as via API — to some 1,500 organizations. But Amazon is not just any organization; It’s a powerful US platform giant with a massive ecommerce business.

The contract reflects that power imbalance; not being a standard NHS content syndication agreement — but rather DHSC tweaking Amazon’s standard terms.

“It was drawn up between both Amazon UK and the Department for Health and Social Care,” a department spokeswoman told us. “Given that Amazon is in the business of holding standard agreements with content providers they provided the template that was used as the starting point for the discussions but it was drawn up in negotiation with the Department for Health and Social Care, and obviously it was altered to apply to UK law rather than US law.”

In July, when the government officially announced the Alexa-NHS partnership, its PR provided a few sample queries of how Amazon’s voice AI might respond to what it dubbed “NHS-verified” information — such as: “Alexa, how do I treat a migraine?”; “Alexa, what are the symptoms of flu?”; “Alexa, what are the symptoms of chickenpox?”.

But of course as anyone who’s ever googled a health symptom could tell you, the types of stuff people are actually likely to ask Alexa — once they realize they can treat it as an NHS-verified info-dispensing robot, and go down the symptom-querying rabbit hole — is likely to range very far beyond the common cold.

At the official launch of what the government couched as a ‘collaboration’ with Amazon, it explained its decision to allow NHS content to be freely piped through Alexa by suggesting that voice technology has “the potential to reduce the pressure on the NHS and GPs by providing information for common illnesses”.

Its PR cited an unattributed claim that “by 2020, half of all searches are expected to be made through voice-assisted technology”.

This prediction is frequently attributed to ComScore, a media measurement firm that was last month charged with fraud by the SEC. However it actually appears to originate with computer scientist Andrew Ng, from when he was chief scientist at Chinese tech giant Baidu.

Econsultancy noted last year that Mary Meeker included Ng’s claim on a slide in her 2016 Internet Trends report — which is likely how the prediction got so widely amplified.

But on Meeker’s slide you can see that the prediction is in fact “images or speech”, not voice alone…

So it turns out the UK government incorrectly cited a tech giant prediction to push a claim that “voice search has been increasing rapidly” — in turn its justification for funnelling NHS users towards Amazon.

“We want to empower every patient to take better control of their healthcare and technology like this is a great example of how people can access reliable, world-leading NHS advice from the comfort of their home, reducing the pressure on our hardworking GPs and pharmacists,” said health secretary Matt Hancock in a July statement.

Since landing at the health department, the app-loving former digital minister has been pushing a tech-first agenda for transforming the NHS — promising to plug in “healthtech” apps and services, and touting “preventative, predictive and personalised care”. He’s also announced an AI lab housed within a new unit that’s intended to oversee the digitization of the NHS.

Compared with all that, plugging the NHS’ website into Alexa probably seems like an easy ‘on-message’ win. But immediately the collaboration was announced concerns were raised that the government is recklessly mixing the streams of critical (and sensitive) national healthcare infrastructure with the rapacious data-appetite of a foreign tech giant with both an advertising and ecommerce business, plus major ambitions of its own in the healthcare space.

On the latter front, just yesterday news broke of Amazon’s second health-related acquisition: Health Navigator, a startup with an API platform for integrating with health services, such as telemedicine and medical call centers, which offers natural language processing tools for documenting health complaints and care recommendations.

Last year Amazon also picked up online pharmacy PillPack — for just under $1BN. While last month it launched a pilot of a healthcare service offering to its own employees in and around Seattle, called Amazon Care. That looks intended to be a road-test for addressing the broader U.S. market down the line. So the company’s commercial designs on healthcare are becoming increasingly clear.

Returning to the UK, in response to early critical feedback on the Alexa-NHS arrangement, the IT delivery arm of the service, NHS Digital, published a blog post going into more detail about the arrangement — following what it couched as “interesting discussion about the challenges for the NHS of working with large commercial organisations like Amazon”.

A core critical “discussion” point is the question of what Amazon will do with people’s medical voice query data, given the partnership is clearly encouraging people to get used to asking Alexa for health advice.

“We have stuck to the fundamental principle of not agreeing a way of working with Amazon that we would not be willing to consider with any single partner – large or small. We have been careful about data, commercialisation, privacy and liability, and we have spent months working with knowledgeable colleagues to get it right,” NHS Digital claimed in July.

In another section of the blog post, responding to questions about what Amazon will do with the data and “what about privacy”, it further asserted there would be no health profiling of customers — writing:

We have worked with the Amazon team to ensure that we can be totally confident that Amazon is not sharing any of this information with third parties. Amazon has been very clear that it is not selling products or making product recommendations based on this health information, nor is it building a health profile on customers. All information is treated with high confidentiality. Amazon restrict access through multi-factor authentication, services are all encrypted, and regular audits run on their control environment to protect it.

Yet it turns out the contract DHSC signed with Amazon is just a content licensing agreement. There are no terms contained in it concerning what can or can’t be done with the medical voice query data Alexa is collecting with the help of “NHS-verified” information.

Per the contract terms, Amazon is required to attribute content to the NHS when Alexa responds to a query with information from the service’s website. (Though the company says Alexa also makes use of medical content from the Mayo Clinic and Wikipedia.) So, from the user’s point of view, they will at times feel like they’re talking to an NHS-branded service.

But without any legally binding confidentiality clauses around what can be done with their medical voice queries it’s not clear how NHS Digital can confidently assert that Amazon isn’t creating health profiles.

The situation seems to sum to, er, trust Amazon. (NHS Digital wouldn’t comment; saying it’s only responsible for delivery not policy setting, and referring us to the DHSC.)

Asked what it does with medical voice query data generated as a result of the NHS collaboration an Amazon spokesperson told us: “We do not build customer health profiles based on interactions with nhs.uk content or use such requests for marketing purposes.”

But the spokesperson could not point to any legally binding contract clauses in the licensing agreement that restrict what Amazon can do with people’s medical queries.

We’ve also asked the company to confirm whether medical voice queries that return NHS content are being processed in the US.

“This collaboration only provides content already available on the NHS.UK website, and absolutely no personal data is being shared by NHS to Amazon or vice versa,” Amazon also told us, eliding the key point that it’s not NHS data being shared with Amazon but NHS users, reassured by the presence of a trusted public brand, being encouraged to feed Alexa sensitive personal data by asking about their ailments and health concerns.

Bizarrely, the Department of Health and Social Care went further. Its spokeswoman claimed in an email that “there will be no data shared, collected or processed by Amazon and this is just an alternative way of providing readily available information from NHS.UK.”

When we spoke to DHSC on the phone prior to this, to raise the issue of medical voice query data generated via the partnership and fed to Amazon — also asking where in the contract are clauses to protect people’s data — the spokeswoman said she would have to get back to us.

All of which suggests the government has a very vague idea (to put it generously) of how cloud-powered voice AIs function.

Presumably no one at DHSC bothered to read the information on Amazon’s own Alexa privacy page — although the department spokeswomen was at least aware this page existed (because she knew Amazon had pointed us to what she called its “privacy notice”, which she said “sets out how customers are in control of their data and utterances”).

If you do read the page you’ll find Amazon offers some broad-brush explanation there which tells you that after an Alexa device has been woken by its wake word, the AI will “begin recording and sending your request to Amazon’s secure cloud”.

Ergo data is collected and processed. And indeed stored on Amazon’s servers. So, yes, data is ‘shared’.

The more detailed Alexa Internet Privacy Notice, meanwhile, sets out broad-brush parameters to enable Amazon’s reuse of Alexa user data — stating that “the information we learn from users helps us personalize and continually improve your Alexa experience and provide information about Internet trends, website popularity and traffic, and related content”. [emphasis ours]

The DHSC sees the matter very differently, though.

With no contractual binds covering health-related queries UK users of Alexa are being encouraged to whisper into Amazon’s robotic ears — data that’s naturally linked to Alexa and Amazon account IDs (and which the Alexa Internet Privacy Notice also specifies can be accessed by “a limited number of employees”) — the government is accepting the tech giant’s standard data processing terms for a commercial, consumer product which is deeply integrated into its increasingly sprawling business empire.

Terms such as indefinite retention of audio recordings — unless users pro-actively request that they are deleted. And even then Amazon admitted this summer it doesn’t always delete the text transcripts of recordings. So even if you keep deleting all your audio snippets, traces of medical queries may well remain on Amazon’s servers.

Earlier this year it also emerged the company employs contractors around the world to listen in to Alexa recordings as part of internal efforts to improve the performance of the AI.

A number of tech giants recently admitted to the presence of such ‘speech grading’ programs, as they’re sometimes called — though none had been up front and transparent about the fact their shiny AIs needed an army of external human eavesdroppers to pull off a show of faux intelligence.

It’s been journalists highlighting the privacy risks for users of AI assistants; and media exposure leading to public pressure on tech giants to force changes to concealed internal processes that have, by default, treated people’s information as an owned commodity that exists to serve and reserve their own corporate interests.

Data protection? Only if you interpret the term as meaning your personal data is theirs to capture and that they’ll aggressively defend the IP they generate from it.

So, in other words, actual humans — both employed by Amazon directly and not — may be listening to the medical stuff you’re telling Alexa. Unless the user finds and activates a recently added ‘no human review’ option buried in Alexa settings.

Many of these arrangements remain under regulatory scrutiny in Europe. Amazon’s lead data protection regulator in Europe confirmed in August it’s in discussions with it over concerns related to its manual reviews of Alexa recordings. So UK citizens — whose taxes fund the NHS — might be forgiven for expecting more care from their own government around such a ‘collaboration’.

Rather than a wholesale swallowing of tech giant T&Cs in exchange for free access to the NHS brand and  “NHS-verified” information which helps Amazon burnish Alexa’s utility and credibility, allowing it to gather valuable insights for its commercial healthcare ambitions.

To date there has been no recognition from DHSC the government has a duty of care towards NHS users as regards potential risks its content partnership might generate as Alexa harvests their voice queries via a commercial conduit that only affords users very partial controls over what happens to their personal data.

Nor is DHSC considering the value being generously gifted by the state to Amazon — in exchange for a vague supposition that a few citizens might go to the doctor a bit less if a robot tells them what flu symptoms look like.

“The NHS logo is supposed to mean something,” says Sam Smith, coordinator at patient data privacy advocacy group, MedConfidential — one of the organizations that makes use of the NHS’ free APIs for health content (but which he points out did not write its own contract for the government to sign).

“When DHSC signed Amazon’s template contract to put the NHS logo on anything Amazon chooses to do, it left patients to fend for themselves against the business model of Amazon in America.”

In a related development this week, Europe’s data protection supervisor has warned of serious data protection concerns related to standard contracts EU institutions have inked with another tech giant, Microsoft, to use its software and services.

The watchdog recently created a strategic forum that’s intended to bring together the region’s public administrations to work on drawing up standard contracts with fairer terms for the public sector — to shrink the risk of institutions feeling outgunned and pressured into accepting T&Cs written by the same few powerful tech providers.

Such an effort is sorely needed — though it comes too late to hand-hold the UK government into striking more patient-sensitive terms with Amazon US.

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[anneedmonds]

Murad Youth Renewal: The Fast-Acting Retinol | AD

You may have realised by now that I’m a total retinol convert; it’s an ingredient that seems to absolutely live up to the hype, with the sort of results even the most hardened skincare sceptics would find it difficult to argue with.

Since the very start of my retinol-testing adventures last year (I say “adventures” because there have been a few ups and downs!) my skin has felt and looked smoother, plumper and brighter. I’ve had virtually no spots or breakouts, even in the week before my period, and the fine, crepey lines on my forehead and around my eyes have really filled out.

I’ve been a bit slack on reporting back on my retinol-testing, I’m afraid, but this post marks the start of a concerted effort to get myself organised and transcribe my (copious and detailed) notes. You can now picture me, if you please, sitting hunched over a large leatherbound book, scratching away by candlelight using a quill and a pot of ink.

And we’re actually working backwards, here, because I’m starting with my most recent spate of retinol testing – the Retinol Youth Renewal range from Murad. Consisting of a silky retinol eye cream, a potent serum and a buttery night cream, this is a completely comprehensive, massively effective skin-overhauling system.

Read on for an exclusive Murad 20% discount code

Now I’d trot out the usual retinol spiel, which is that skin looks and feels smoother and firmer and more radiant, and I’d talk about how retinol is the gold standard anti-aging ingredient, how it tackles pretty much every skin concern from wrinkles to spots, pigmentation to sagging, and all of this would be both accurate and true. But in all honesty, there are so many great retinol products on the market that I could repeat myself over and over again, and ultimately that’s not very helpful if you’re trying to choose where to spend your money.

(Actually, this is one of the reasons I’ve found it so difficult to write up my retinol findings; it’s often quite hard to find a point of difference between the products I’ve tried. If a product’s results are good and there’s very little in the way of “downtime” (usually it’s a case of how strong the retinol is and how slowly you introduce it into your routine) then you find yourself focusing on price point, packaging quirks, the colour of the font they’ve used on the ingredients list. Etc.)

So you need a unique selling point, something that sets a product apart from the rest of the bunch, and in Murad’s case it’s the very, very impressive Tri-Active formula, proven to be 250% more powerfully renewing than a traditional retinol formula. Now in true Crilly style, I didn’t read any of the blurb before starting my testing (I like to live life dangerously) so I had no idea how often to use the products, how slowly to introduce them or how fast they would work. I ploughed straight on in with all three things – eye serum, face serum and night cream.

Readers: I got the tingle. I have to say that I hadn’t felt the tingle in quite a while and I was mildly alarmed after I applied the serum and it got to work. It felt strong. I then smoothed the buttery night cream atop and my whole face was pleasantly fluttery, as though filled with millions of miniscule butterflies. I went to sleep not knowing what I would wake up to but – to be fair – that’s nothing new. Sometimes the owls wake me up in the early hours, hooting so loudly it’s like I have a group of demented flute players hanging out in my trees. Other times I wake up spooning an upside down dog and, once, he even had a whole claw inserted into my left nostril.

So I got the tingle and knew I wasn’t trifling with any old retinol – I fully expected to wake up with my face falling off. But I didn’t. I mean I did wake up (God, that would be a tragic turn of events for a blog post on skincare!), I just didn’t wake up with my skin falling off. In fact, I woke up with skin that looked a lot better – cushiony and well-hydrated and incredibly smooth. And as the week went on my skin looked noticeably better and better, which was both surprising and disconcerting because a) things don’t usually work so fast and b) if they do work that fast there’s usually an element of face fall-out. Or face fall-off.

Had I read the Murad blurb I would have been well prepped for this revelation. I would have known that the Tri-Active formula in the Retinol Youth Renewal range works in three different ways. Firstly there’s a time-released retinol, which slowly and steadily delivers a consistent level of retinol to the skin and secondly there’s a retinol booster which makes the skin more receptive to the retinol, making sure that it’s as effective as it can possibly be. But thirdly, and this is the piece de resistance for me, there’s the fast-acting retinoid. More powerful than the retinol, it gives much faster results by very quickly boosting cell turnover. Smoother, firmer, plumper skin in far less time.

Triple whammy, then, and despite the impressive results and even the tingle, the formula felt gentle, non-aggressive, surprisingly hydrating.

I say surprising, but none of this really comes as a surprise because Dr Howard Murad, the man behind the Murad brand, is a veritable skin genius. I have a claim to fame, which is that I met the man himself, back in 2012, at his clinic in LA. Long-time readers (thanks for sticking around and putting up with my nonsense) will remember a Q&A series I ran with him (you can find all of the posts here) answering the most common skincare questions and complaints.

Now the thing about Dr Murad is this: he doesn’t see skincare as the answer to skin complaints. Despite the fact that he has a hugely successful skincare brand, he is a champion of a far wider approach to skin health, looking at emotional wellbeing and diet rather than just prescribing topical treatments.

When I met Dr Murad in LA I was actually quite taken aback when he started talking about the inside-out approach – I was there to write about his skincare, I thought that he was there to promote his skincare, and it seemed so counterproductive for him to be telling me how important these other aspects of skin health were. But he was, of course, completely right. And it only made me trust him more. His skincare formulas have often been groundbreaking – he’s a true beauty visionary – yet his brand, the Murad brand, is about much more than scientific formulas. It’s about his approach to modern wellness, which is probably why (at the age of eighty, the man’s a total machine) he’s treated over 50,000 patients.

I’ve gone down a total rabbit hole thinking about my trip to LA and the very powerful skin peel I had at the clinic – I was, at the same time as the trip, finishing my final dissertation for my masters degree and I remember writing away at my little desk at the Standard Hotel and feeling how smooth my skin was. Noisiest hotel I’ve ever stayed in, by the way, The Standard, and they also have a weird glass tank in the reception where people sit doing mundane things, like a piece of performance art. It was all very distracting.

Anyway, back to the products before Murad regret ever commissioning me to do this post. (Head Office: “could you not have found someone who actually sticks to the point? This woman is barking mad!”) I used all three; the Retinol Youth Renewal Eye Serum, the Retinol Youth Renewal Serum and the Retinol Youth Renewal Night Cream. The results using all three were fast and furious, though furious in a gentle way, like an angry cloud, rather than spikily furious, like a hedgehog with a parking ticket.

Shop at Murad: 20% off all products with code RUTH20

I also tried the products separately, but it would be absolutely impossible, in a domestic setting such as my own, to quantify the difference in results. What I will say is this: if you wanted all three products, there would be far worse ways you could spend your cash. This range is solid, doesn’t make absurd claims and is definitely more immediate in its effects than most retinols I’ve tried. But if finances didn’t permit the procurement of all three then the single products are absolutely an amazing addition to any skincare routine.

The Retinol Youth Renewal Eye Serum (get 20% off with the code RUTH20 here) has – obviously – been formulated for the delicate eye area, which is often advised to be avoided when it comes to retinol products. So if you’re specifically looking for a potent helper for eye wrinkles and sagginess, this would be your bag.

The Retinol Youth Renewal Serum (20% off with the code RUTH20 here) would be my pick if you wanted one product and an easy way of introducing a retinol into your existing skincare routine – cleanse, serum and then your chosen face cream. Simple.

The Retinol Youth Renewal Night Cream (20% off, you know the drill, code is RUTH20 here) would be my suggestion if you don’t particularly like using a serum and have a two-step night routine – cleanse and moisturise. It’s gorgeously rich and buttery – though not greasy – and you get your Tri-Active formula without any extra product layering. I don’t have access to strengths and percentages (proprietary information) but I’m going to make an educated guess that the serum is more potent and the serum and night cream layered together, more potent still; but if you want to plump for one product and you’re a die-hard old-school skincare minimalist then this cream will not disappoint.

So, who’s Retinol Youth Renewal for? Pretty much all but the most sensitive of skin. And from people in their twenties right up to however old you’re lucky enough to be – whether you’re trying to tackle spots and breakouts or reduce the lines that are creeping up around eyes, mouth, forehead, this really is a skincare powerhouse.

You can find more info on the range at the Murad website here – the section about Dr Murad here is also a very interesting read, should you be fascinated by colourful life stories and inspirational people…

Get 20% at Murad with the code RUTH20 here

(Code is valid on all products on the Murad UK website until 23.59pm on Friday 3rd May 2019.)

The post Murad Youth Renewal: The Fast-Acting Retinol | AD appeared first on A Model Recommends.

Murad Youth Renewal: The Fast-Acting Retinol | AD was first posted on April 28, 2019 at 7:55 am. ©2018 "A Model Recommends". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at contact@amodelrecommends.com Murad Youth Renewal: The Fast-Acting Retinol | AD published first on https://medium.com/@SkinAlley