A team of us at CR visited the Kickstarter office in Brooklyn Thursday 24 July. We mostly did this to see an example of a consumer-to-consumer marketplace. The idea of visiting arose when we noticed demand that we do product testing on several products which had been produced through Kickstarter’s platform.
In my mind, Kickstarter, eBay, Uber, Airbnb, and others have a lot in common in that they are all platforms which create new marketplaces by undercutting existing sellers by circumventing traditional barriers to entering established markets. Uber seems poised to gross billions of dollars starting now and Airbnb is the same. While I am happy for the consumer benefit these platforms bring I wish the companies themselves had more compassion for the consumer, but in my opinion, they focus on their right to do business and are not mindful of the consequences and harms that they bring in changing the market. In my mind, it would be ideal if all these platforms could be nonprofit organizations because they crowdsource all their product, control no patents or unique technology, add little value to the transaction, and are in the desirable place of having a monopoly on both ends of the market – only they can sell the product to consumers and only they can market the product from sellers.
I think this is relevant for health because I expect that upstart companies will increasing encroach on health services in the same way. I expect this especially in the space of consumer health data, like “quantified self” “activity trackers” like the Fitbit. If a doctor prescribed this kind of device, the data would be protected by privacy laws, but if consumers collect better and more invasive health information than hospitals and doctors could ever imagine taking, and they give this to a third-party company, it can make a lot of HIPAA laws obsolete since HIPAA would only be protecting insignificant amounts of data while other more valuable and personal data is in the hands of others. Consumer Reports own open notes project supports this notion, and because of that, I feel that it is Consumer Reports’ place to think about consumer-to-consumer marketplaces like Airbnb because the medical equivalent of those platforms is where “open notes” are going to go. PatientsLikeMe already is going to be taking this kind of data and others will follow.
The Kickstarter office seemed well organized and everyone whom we met could explain Kickstarter in their own way, which I thought was nice. The office is in a nice place in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and after our visit I had coffee in the neighborhood.