Fintech companies are always in a grey area, with an unimaginable amount of personal financial data of their users. A good example of this is Viva Republic, the service provider of Toss, one of the biggest fintech companies in Korea. Although it was not hacked, there is much controversy regarding the way users’ information is being treated. Another example of a public safety risk due to over-networked systems would be social media companies. These companies have a lot of sensitive personal information with which many criminals could exploit for various purposes. From time to time, these social media companies report instances of user information being hacked — all they do is release a letter of apology and move on with business. This is a critical problem. Similarly, many celebrities’ Apple Cloud accounts have been hacked and this in turn results in leaks of personal data (e.g. nu de pictures). Although most of the iCloud hacking cases were due to the users’ passwords being leaked, this raised questions on the issue of privacy. Since Apple has taken multiple steps to tackle this problem with 2-step Authorization, fewer instances of such leaks have become publicized.
If the CEO had ignored the woman who spoke out at the meeting, there would never have been any discussion about taking the core elements of the company (recipe) offline. In the situation, the woman was the only person to bring up the issue, and even then, the COO tried to silence her opinion. In this situation, she was almost an underdog. The implicit assumptions were all against her favor. The reading seems to acknowledge the fact that she did not have a technical background, she was an assistant to a powerful leader in the organization who was directly trying to dismiss her idea, and her being a female was also not helpful. Despite all these implicit assumptions, she still challenged the idea. This was not a matter of ego, but an act of courage to offer different perspectives for the company in a dire situation. Ray Dalio mentions in his book ‘Priciples’ the idea of being radically open. In essence, it is much better to accept the diverse ideas from the people around you (particularly if they are differing in nature from your original idea), than to only take in the subservience of the ‘Yes’ people around you.
We at Flowy are trying to gather as much user voice data as possible. Although this data will be used solely for speech analysis purposes, the element of trust in a system is crucial. When speaking to a digital agent, the user (human) is unaware of what the engine (machine) is doing in the background. This causes a sense of uncertainty, which needs to be addressed by the designers of the product. Our goal is to make sure that the user feels most comfortable when speaking with the digital agent (Flowy), so that the user can discuss just about any personal matter going on in their personal lives.
