How Are We Going To Use Our Health Data For Public Good?

Google is accessing the health data of millions of Americans, supposedly to develop algorithms able to diagnose some medical problems. What it is doing is legal, but has set off a privacy scare and a federal inquiry after an employee of the company wrote an anonymous article in The Guardian highlighting the lack of anonymity and concerns about the possible uses of the data in the future.

Known internally as Project Nightingale, the project involves some 250 employees from Google and from the health giant Ascension: Google has denied any wrongdoings or privacy violations stating that the company is just building a new internal search tool for the Ascension hospital network and that no patient data is being used for Google’s artificial intelligence research. This is an extremely interesting project, but one that requires strict privacy protections. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which also works on health-related issues through its companies Calico or Verily, and that recently acquired Fitbit, is not the only technology company interested in data collection and its analysis: Apple has been hiring doctors for some time and working with Stanford University to develop macro-studies with almost half a million users using heart rate data provided by their Apple Watches; Amazon also seems to have set its sights on the healthcare market.

These types of studies, which combine machine learning and the obvious expertise of these companies to handle mass health data, are a new frontier in the field of medicine, where studies are much less ambitious and typically involve much lower amounts of data, while offering the possibility of great advances for society. That said, concerns are justified if the studies take place under conditions that allow, by action or omission, the health data of its participants to be exposed or used for purposes other than originally established, or if people are not allowed to opt out, as seems to be the case.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.