September 26, 2019 Good morning. David Meyer here in Berlin, filling in for Alan.
Like many observers, I was dismayed at yesterday’s events in the U.K. Parliament, now back in action thanks to the judicial cancellation of its illegal suspension by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Johnson is pursuing a divisive path in an attempt to goad the opposition into agreeing to an election he can cast in people-versus-Parliament terms. He refused to apologize for breaking the law, as the Supreme Court unanimously found he had done, and called Parliament’s recent no-deal-Brexit-blocking law—to which he refuses to adhere—the “Surrender Act.”
When female MPs expressed fears for their own safety as a result of his language, especially given the 2016 assassination of anti-Brexit MP Jo Cox, and the death threats they continue to receive, he casually dismissed their concerns as “humbug.” Then he provoked fury by saying the best way to honor Cox was to “get Brexit done.”
It is now clear that, as things stand, there can be no Brexit deal; there is no way this riven Parliament can come together to pass it. It is also by now legally impossible to run Johnson’s hoped-for election before the October 31st Brexit deadline. So if Johnson is not somehow removed, an economically catastrophic no-deal Brexit is a near-certainty.
On a lighter note, late last week I met up with Daniel Nathrath, the CEO and co-founder of Ada Health, a startup whose “A.I.” app helps people work through their symptoms and determine whether they ought to see a doctor, before passing on its findings to those professionals in order to speed up diagnosis. Ada has taken nearly $70 million in funding, with investors including Google Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler and William Tunstall-Pedoe, the entrepreneur behind what became Amazon’s Alexa.
Nathrath had some interesting things to say about having a Germany-based company operating in the health care A.I. space these days. Germany is, after all, the cradle of data protection law, and its strong privacy norms last year spread across the EU in the form of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR.)
He said Germans’ strict ideas on privacy used to be a hindrance to the company, with some doctors “making up reasons” to resist innovation. Now, however, it “will be a competitive advantage for us coming from Germany rather than the U.S. because people know they can trust us,” Nathrath said. “You see some of the things that happen in the U.S. or China with data…because of the GDPR, it’s documented that we would try to uphold the highest standards.”
Health data is of course a rare area where the U.S. has federal data-privacy legislation, but nonetheless it will be interesting to see whether the GDPR really does give the EU’s sensitive-data-handling firms an advantage in global perception.
More news below.
David Meyer
david.meyer@fortune.com
@superglaze
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