RANDOM ACCESS
Joel Burgess wonders if Alphabet going on a health kick?
Google and the future of health data
“Google has access to the detailed health records of 50 million US citizens after partnering with the largest Cathlolic hospital network in the US. ”
If you’ve kept track of the full impact of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, or you’re one of the people that tout that ‘big data is the new oil’, then you’ll be fully aware of how powerful information on populations is and how easily it can be misused in the current regulation climate. The latest installment in the data wars concerns the announcement by Google in November that it intended to purchase Fitbit, and all the data that comes with it, for US$2.1 billion.
Since Google’s acquisition announcement was accompanied by another separate press release explicitly stating the Google has no intention of using Fitbit’s health data to inform advertising, it appears that Google is infinitely more aware of the general public’s concern for the dark arts of big data than a company like, say, Facebook (which we covered last month for publicly stating it didn’t feel the need to fact check political advertising).
That said, the search engine giant has been far more willing to step over ethical boundaries in the last couple of years since it officially ditched the ‘Don’t be evil’ clause as its motto and began fulfilling US military contracts for drone AI image recognition technology. And while Facebook’s ‘move fast, break things’ ethos keeps it front and centre in the data misuse debate, Google has been shown to be capable of swaying voters in the 2016 US elections with biased search results (even if that bias was deemed to be largely unintentional by a congressional hearing in August) and it did get slapped with a US$5 billion fine in 2018 for using its search monopoly to manipulate results for financial gain and stifle competition in Europe.
Later in November a Wall Street Journal article released a story on how Google has access to the detailed health records of 50 million US citizens after partnering with Ascension, the largest Cathlolic hospital network in the US. Project Nightingale, as the collaboration was called, became an active investigation by the Office for Civil
Rights the day after the WSJ article, since there are some stringent regulations regarding the use and sharing of patient data.
The 150 Google employees that have been working on the project over the last year have a number of objectives, but one of the more controversial is likely to be the use of patient data to create an AI treatment recommendation system to better manage patients recovery and the provided care tasks required. Since the data contains sensitive health information, diagnoses, lab results and hospitalisation records it is subject to stringent third party information sharing laws that prevent this information being used for anything other than patient treatment purposes. Google has since made a public statement that it is “Happy to cooperate with any questions about the project” and that it believes its work adheres to all relevant regulations, but according to the WSJ Google is not being paid by Ascension for its services, instead intending to use the privileged patient information to develop a marketable AI patient treatment recommendation software.
While you’d really need to be a US legal expert to know if Google is skirting the law here, it’s pretty clear that it is at least operating extremely closely to it. At the moment, big data seems to have a healthy outlook.