Google’s coronavirus testing website arrives – with serious privacy concerns
It wasn’t anything close to the nationwide online coronavirus triage and testing tool that Donald Trump had promised. But on Sunday evening, a website allowing residents of two northern California counties to enter symptoms and, if eligible, make an appointment for coronavirus testing went live.
By Monday morning, however, the project by Verily – a sister company to Google under the corporate umbrella of Alphabet – had reached capacity, and users were informed that no more testing appointments were available.
The site’s modest utility and scope stands in stark contrast to what had been promised on Friday, when the president announced in a news conference that Google had 1,700 engineers working on a website that would “be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past, to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location”.
Trump’s concept was news to the nation – and to Google, which had no such website in the works. Verily, which grew out of Google’s research and development organization Google X but is now a separate company, was indeed working on a triage website, but it was only in the early stages, and only intended for California.
Verily staff worked through the weekend, but the launch has not been without issues. In addition to being limited to two counties in the San Francisco Bay area, the tool is only available in English and to people above 18 years old.
The survey begins by asking users if they are “currently experiencing severe cough, shortness of breath, fever, or other concerning symptoms?” People who answer this question “yes” are told that “in-person Covid-19 testing through this program is not the right fit”. They are advised to seek medical attention.
The answer is not a mistake – testing sites are not appropriate venues for people with severe symptoms to seek medical care – but it appears to have caused confusion among some users.
“We are early in this pilot and are going to be learning more that will help us refine this Covid-19 risk screening and testing,” a spokeswoman for Verily said. “We’re beginning by screening and testing individuals at high risk of Covid-19.”
Privacy and data concerns
The Verily tool has also raised questions about privacy and data use. The tool was built using Verily’s Project Baseline platform, a pre-existing product that allows individuals to enroll in clinical studies. As with Project Baseline,
users are required to login with a Google account, so they must either use one they already have or create one.
Verily sought to assuage concerns in lengthy written responses to questions about data usage from the Guardian. The company said that users of the Covid-19 tool will be given the choice to enroll in Project Baseline after they receive their test results, but will not be automatically signed up for the program. If users decline, their data will not be used for research “other than by the California Public Health authorities for this public health emergency”, the company said.
Verily further said that no data from the project will be used for advertising purposes, and that it will “never be joined with individual’s data stored in Google products without your explicit permission”.
Information that individuals enter into the site may be shared with certain third parties, however. Verily said that its own staff, as well as “volunteers from Google” who are working on the project, will have access to data to help schedule tests and return results.
Who those authorities are and how the information would be shared remains unclear.
“The information individuals provide may also be shared with the healthcare professionals who collect their specimen, the clinical laboratory that processes their specimen, and public health authorities that assist with this testing program for purposes related to performing tests, communicating test results, administering and improving the testing program and for public health purposes,” the company said.
“The bottom line is that we’re talking about a very unclear and vague situation where a private entity that has unclear ties to both the state government and possibly the federal government will be collecting what would normally be considered protected health information from individuals,” said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We just don’t know enough to know how information that is gathered through this site is collected or used.”
“One worries that when something like this is put together in a hurry, that it’s not going to provide the strongest level of privacy protection,” Tien added.
The Guardian has asked Verily whether it has signed a memorandum of understanding with California authorities delineating the data flows. Verily has not yet responded to a question about whether the tool is covered by Hipaa, the US law protecting the privacy of medical records.
The intense pressure on Verily stemmed from what appears to have been a high-level game of telephone between the Trump administration and Verily.
Trump heard about Verily’s project through Jared Kushner, the New York Times reported. Kushner had discussed the concept with Andy Conrad, the chief executive of Verily, and expressed enthusiasm for the idea, but neither Google nor Verily was prepared for the president’s announcement of the pilot project as a fait accompli.
Since Friday, Google has worked to make the president’s false statements into a reality. On Saturday, it announced that it would partner with the US government to develop “a nationwide website that includes information about Covid-19 symptoms, risk and testing information”. That website is expected to launch “late Monday” and appears designed to be a kind of clearinghouse for “authoritative information” about the pandemic, with links to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
Google is also placing a link to “coronavirus tips” directly on its homepage. The top result for users who click through is a large infographic with simple advice from the WHO to slow the spread of the disease.