Thread by @doctorow

The #startup world's dirty not-so-secret: most startups fail. Startups are risky and so investors place bets on lots of startups and fold the ones that don't show promise, which sucks for the company employees, but also for the users who depend on the company's products. 1/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2022/12/12/uns… 2/

You know what this is like: you sink a bunch of time into familiarizing yourself with a new product, you spend money on accessories for it, you lock your data into it, you integrate it into your life, and then, one morning - poof! All gone. 3/

There are ways that startups could mitigate their customers' risk: publish their #SourceCode under a #free/#open license so it can be maintained by third parties, refuse to patent their technology, or dedicate patents to an open patent pool, etc. 4/

All of this might tempt more people to try their product or service, because the customers for digital products are increasingly savvy, having learned hard lessons when the tools they previously depended were orphaned by startups whose investors pulled the plug. 5/

But very few startups do this, because their investors won't let them. Another dirty not-so-secret: when a startup fails, investors try to make back some of their losses by selling the company's assets to any buyer, no matter how sleazy. 6/

A startup's physical assets are typically minimal: used ergonomic chairs and laptops don't exactly hold their value, and there's not much of a market for t-shirts and stickers advertising dead businesses. 7/

Wily investors are more interested in *intangible* assets: #UserData and #patents, which are sold off to the highest bidder. 8/

That bidder is almost certainly a bottom-feeding scumbag, because the best way to maximize the value of user data is to abuse it, and the best way to maximize a failed business patent is to use it for patent trolling. 9/

If you let your investors talk you into patenting your cool idea, there's a minuscule chance that the patent will be the core of a profitable business - and a *much* larger chance that it end up in a troll's portfolio. Real businesses make things that people want. 10/

Patent trolls are parasites, "businesses" whose only products are legal threats and lawsuits, which they use to bleed out real businesses. 11/

The looming threat of dissolution gives rise to a third startup dirty secret: faced with a choice of growth or sustainability, companies choose growth. 12/

There's no point in investing in sustainability - good information security, robust systems, good HR - if it costs you the runway you need to achieve liftoff. 13/

Your excellent processes won't help you when your investors shut you down, so a "lean" startup has only the minimum viable resiliency and robustness. If you do manage to attain liftoff - or get sold to a Big Tech firm - *then* you can fix all that stuff. 14/

And if the far more likely outcome - failure - comes to pass, then all the liabilities you've created with your indifferent security and resiliency will be someone else's problem. #LimitedLiability, baby! 15/

Combine these three dirty secrets and it's hard to understand why anyone would use a startup's product, knowing that it will collect as much data as it can, secure it only indifferently, and sell that data on to sleazy data-brokers. 16/

Meanwhile, the product you buy and rely upon will probably become a radioactive wasteland of #ClosedSource and #PatentTrolling, with so much technology and policy debt that no one can afford to take responsibility for it. 17/

Think of #Cloudpets, a viral toy sensation whose manufacturer, #SpiralToys, had a successful IPO - and then immediately started hemorrhaging money and shedding employees. 18/

Cloudpets were plush toys that you connected to your home wifi; they had built-in mics that kids could activate to record a voice-memo, which was transmitted to their parents' phones by means of an app, and parents could send messages back via the toys' speakers. 19/

But Spiral Toys never bothered to secure those voice memos or the system for making new ones. The entire database of all recordings by kids and parents sat on an unencrypted, publicly accessible server for years. 20/

It was so indifferently monitored that no one noticed that hackers had downloaded the database multiple times, leaving behind threats to dump it unless they were paid ransoms. 21/

By the time this came to light, Spiral Toys' share price was down more than 99% and no one was answering any of its email addresses or phones. 22/

The data - 2.2 *million* intimate, personal communications between small children and their parents - just hung out there, free for the taking:

troyhunt.com/data-from-conn… 23/

#DataLeakage is irreversible. Those 2,200,000 voice memos are now immortal, child-ghosts that will haunt the internet forever - after the parents are dead, after the kids are dead. 24/

#DataBreaches are permanent. Filling a startup's sandcastle with your important data is a high-risk bet that the company will attain liftoff before it breaches. 25/

It's not just data that goes away when startups fold - it's also money you invest in hardware and systems, as well as the cost of replacing devices that get bricked when a company goes bust. That's bad enough when it's a home security device:

gizmodo.com/spectrum-kills… 26/

But what about when the device is *inside your body*?

Earlier this year, many people with #Argus #OpticalImplants - which allow blind people to see - lost their vision when the manufacturer, #SecondSight, went bust:

spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obs… 27/

#NanoPrecisionMedical, the company's new owners, aren't interested in maintaining the implants, so that's the end of the road for everyone with one of Argus's "bionic" eyes. 28/

The $150,000 per eye that those people paid is gone, and they have failing hardware permanently wired into their nervous systems. 29/

Having a bricked eye implant doesn't just rob you of your sight - many Argus users experience crippling vertigo and other side effects of nonfunctional implants. 30/

The company has promised to "do our best to provide virtual support" to people whose Argus implants fail - but no more parts and no more patches.

Second Sight wasn't the first neural implant vendor to abandon its customers, nor was it the last. 31/

Last week, @liamjdrew told the stories of other neural abandonware in "Abandoned: the human cost of neurotechnology failure" in @Nature:

nature.com/immersive/d415… 32/

Among that abandonware: ATI's neural implant for reducing #ClusterHeadaches, Nuvectra's spinal-cord stimulator for #ChronicPain, Freehand's #paralysis bypass for hands and arms, and others. 33/

People with these implants are left in a precarious limbo, reliant on reverse-engineering and a dwindling supply of parts for maintenance.

Drew asked his expert subjects what is to be done about this. 34/

The least plausible answer is to let the market work its magic: "long-term support on the commercial side would be a competitive advantage." 35/

In other words, wait for companies to realize that promising a durable product will attract customers, so that the other companies go out of business. 36/

A better answer: #standardization. "If components were common across devices, one manufacturer might be able to step in and offer spares when another goes under." 86% of surgeons who implant neurostimulators back this approach. 37/

But the best answer comes from Hunter Peckham, co-developer of Freehand and a @cwru biomedical engineer: open hardware. 38/

"Peckham plans to make the design specifications and supporting documentation of new implantable technologies developed by his team freely available. 'Then people can just cut and paste.'"

This isn't just the best answer, it's the only one. 39/

There's no ethical case for permanently attaching computers to people's nervous systems without giving them the absolute, irrevocable right to nominate who maintains those computers and how. 40/

This is the case that @CDameffMD, @jefftullymd and I made at our @Defcon panel this year: "Why Patients Should Hack #Medtech." 41/

Patients know things about their care and their needs that no one else can ever fully appreciate; they are the best people to have the final say over med-tech decisions:

42/

This is the principle that animates #Colorado's #HB221031, the "Consumer Right To Repair #PoweredWheelchairs Act," landmark #RightToRepair legislation that was signed into law last year:

eff.org/deeplinks/2022… 43/

Opponents of this proposal will say that it will discourage investment in "innovation" in neurological implants. 44/

They may well be right: the kinds of private investors who hedge their bets on high-risk ventures by minimizing security and resilience and exploiting patents and user-data might well be scared off of investment by a requirement to make the technology open. 45/

It may be that showboating billionaire dilettantes will be unwilling to continue to pour money into neural implant companies if they are required to put the lives of the people who use their products ahead of their own profits. 46/

It may be that the only humane, sustainable way to develop neural implants is to publicly fund that research and development, with the condition that the work products be standard, open, and replicable. 47/

Image:
Cryteria (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9…

CC BY 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.… 48/