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Did you read the article? It doesn't seem like they did anything wrong beyond giving too much power to a 3rd party vendor.

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SkyPuncher 3y ago
“Third party” is not an excuse for “first party” First party is fully responsible for what vendors they choose to use. As a customer, I have little insight into that.
wpietri 3y ago
Did you? I have seen people get told they have cancer. That Grail can blame some other company is surely little consolation to people who spent 36 hours or more thinking they might be dead soon.
heisenbit 3y ago
Careful selection and monitoring remains their responsibility and accountability typically remains with them. Delegation is not risk free although plenty of managers pretend otherwise.
cycomanic 3y ago
I read the article, in my book the option of sending out a mass email of "you have cancer" should have been impossible. If a test showed that there is potential for cancer the email should have always been written by a real human. Instead it seems the "you have cancer" template sits in the same system with all the other "customer engagement" emails. If that's not a "sign of moving fast and break things" then I don't know. These different topics should have been compartmentalised into totally different departments that don't have anything to do with each other.
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
  If you're sending thousands of emails with essentially identical content, it seems pointless to me to have them written by a human. Can you imagine the job of a human writing different wordings for "you have cancer" hundreds of times per day? Is that what we should be using humans for?
  - wpietri 3y ago
    They have already explained the point. It's reducing the number of people who are incorrectly told they may soon die a horrible death. If there are better ways to prevent that than a human-in-the-loop approach, feel free to propose it. But having watched it happen a couple of times, I'll note that actual doctors deliver cancer diagnoses in person, so it's not unreasonable to think that should continue to be the case.

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SkyPuncher 3y ago

“Third party” is not an excuse for “first party” First party is fully responsible for what vendors they choose to use. As a customer, I have little insight into that.

wpietri 3y ago

Did you? I have seen people get told they have cancer. That Grail can blame some other company is surely little consolation to people who spent 36 hours or more thinking they might be dead soon.

heisenbit 3y ago

Careful selection and monitoring remains their responsibility and accountability typically remains with them. Delegation is not risk free although plenty of managers pretend otherwise.

cycomanic 3y ago

I read the article, in my book the option of sending out a mass email of "you have cancer" should have been impossible. If a test showed that there is potential for cancer the email should have always been written by a real human. Instead it seems the "you have cancer" template sits in the same system with all the other "customer engagement" emails. If that's not a "sign of moving fast and break things" then I don't know. These different topics should have been compartmentalised into totally different departments that don't have anything to do with each other.

Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
If you're sending thousands of emails with essentially identical content, it seems pointless to me to have them written by a human. Can you imagine the job of a human writing different wordings for "you have cancer" hundreds of times per day? Is that what we should be using humans for?
- wpietri 3y ago
  They have already explained the point. It's reducing the number of people who are incorrectly told they may soon die a horrible death. If there are better ways to prevent that than a human-in-the-loop approach, feel free to propose it. But having watched it happen a couple of times, I'll note that actual doctors deliver cancer diagnoses in person, so it's not unreasonable to think that should continue to be the case.