NT: And have you changed any of your privacy policies since the Cambridge Analytica stuff?

MS: Not to my knowledge, because it’s not really something that applies to us. If you’re a provider under Oscar, your doctor can log in to a system of Oscar and can request your clinical data, but none of those things are related, from our legal counsel’s point of view, to any of the things that I think the social networks had to go through.

NT: But presumably you have much richer data sets. If you know the time that I talk to somebody about a health care condition, that's hugely effective in giving more care, but it also means wherever it’s stored in your system it somehow also makes it easier to de-anonymize me, right, because every little bit of information is attached to every little person, and every little file in a large data set in some future time is possibly shared out of network, or possibly a hack could put more people at risk. So, as you get these incredible data sets, how do you add extra layers of protection at each step of the process?

MS: One, by having a team of dozens of people who spend their time on security every single day and making sure that our internal systems are tight. That’s the engineering team, the security team, and so on. Two, by having dozens of people on the compliance side that watch what we do. And as an insurance company and a technology company, our organization is an interesting sort of amalgamation of what you would expect in a typical insurance company and what you would expect at a typical technology company. Therefore we have a very big compliance staff, a very big legal staff, and they have layers and layers of safety and security in there in ways that I feel comfortable with. But we also say, every single year, we’ve got to be compliant, got to make sure we push for better protection and more security.

NT: Great. Another question I'm sure you get often: Your cofounder is the brother of the son-in-law of the president of the United States. How have you navigated that in the year and a half that President Trump's been in office? How has your view on how to navigate that issue changed?

MS: It hasn’t changed from the beginning, which is: This does not affect what we do. The business hasn't gotten any easier in the past couple of years, but it's never been easy, and I think if we don't obsess over trying to create a better health care experience and making sure we deliver that promise to our members, then we wouldn't be spending our time right. And that's what we’ve been totally focused on. And whatever happened in the press, whatever happens on the regulatory side, I have personally always thought, and I think the company shares in this, that if we have something that leads to lower costs and happier members in some shape or form we’ll be able to turn this into a successful company. However, the regulatory environment changes over time, it’s something we have to be mindful of, of course, as this happened as we watched it, but it never affected what we do day to day. And so from that point of view, any kind of disconnectivity, however it looks, never played a role inside the company. When we get out there and make a point about how we think health care should work, we do it publicly and we answer questions to the Congress and whatever else, but that’s it.

NT: Got it. OK, last question since I know we’re running out of time. Tell me one problem in health care that you have not been able to solve yet that you hope to be able to solve in the next couple of years.

MS: I would say—and this will take many years—but curing a complex issue from afar. I think there will be lots of ways in which telemedicine will become even more powerful, and that’s one we haven't been able to solve. I think that’s one that will keep us occupied for years to come.

NT: Excellent. Alright, well thank you very much. Thank you for talking with WIRED.

MS: Absolutely, it was nice to talk.

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